Homemade cherry plum wine is a real curiosity among winemakers. However, in terms of taste and aromatic properties, this drink will give odds to many fruit and berry wines. To paraphrase the classic, let’s say: “If life gives you cherry plum, don’t wince, but squeeze the juice out of it and make wine.”
Not all types of plums are good for making plum wine. Fortunately, cherry plum, whose yields often exceed all expectations, is very suitable for winemaking. It makes excellent dessert and fortified wines, and even if the drink is not to your taste, you can always overtake it for an unusual brandy. The only thing is that it, like any other plum, has a lot of pectin, and, as you know, it does not greatly contribute to the extraction of juice from fruits. For the same reason, cherry plum wine clarifies for a long time. However, the result is worth the sacrifice and patience.
In the last article, I talked about how to make a delicious cherry plum liqueur, where I mentioned the so-called vodka/alcohol-free liqueur. In fact, this is an ordinary wine, which we will now learn how to make. The most difficult task in this business is getting the juice to make the wort. This can be done in two ways: by fermenting cherry plum puree or by adding pectinase enzyme to it. You can also get juice by heating the fruit to 80оC, but I will not recommend this method for certain reasons.
Cherry plum wine in Polish
- 8 kg cherry plum/mirabelle
- 4,5 liter of clean water
- 2,8 kg of granulated sugar
- 5 g citric acid
- 3 g yeast feed (optional)
- 1 pack wine yeast (optional)
Wild Yeast Cooking Option
Ripe plums (cherry plum, mirabelle) do not wash, free from pits and grind into a homogeneous gruel. Cover the container with gauze and leave in a warm place for 2-3 days until fermentation is activated. Then carefully drain the clarified juice into a separate container for fermentation, and squeeze the cake through cheesecloth. Drain the squeezed liquid into a fermentation tank, add water, half the sugar and citric acid. If desired and possible, add half of the yeast feed from the liquor store (vitamins, minerals, etc., which contribute to better fermentation). Install a water seal.
After 2 weeks of active fermentation, drain the wine from the sediment, add the second half of the sugar (dissolve sugar in a small amount of must) and feed the yeast. After another 2-3 weeks, when the fermentation should slow down, drain the young wine from the sediment again, install a water seal and transfer to a cool place for clarification and maturation. Every 2-4 weeks, it is advisable to drain homemade cherry plum wine from the sediment. Often the drink is clarified on its own (about 1 year), but if this process is too long, then you can apply one of the methods of clarification of wine artificially. As a result, you should get a very beautiful and tasty wine with a strength of about 17%.
Cooking option with CKD
Crush the cherry plum with the bones with your hands and place in a large container, for example, in a bucket. Boil a third of the sugar and a third of the water into a simple syrup and add to the wort. Cover the container with a thick cloth and gauze, and then leave for 2 days in a warm place. After 2 days, drain the liquid wort, and pour the cake with a new portion of syrup from a third of water and a third of sugar. Wait 2 days and drain the liquid wort again. The remaining cake, in order to extract all the precious juice from it, pour the last third of the water, mix well and drain, and strain the cake through a colander or gauze.
In the resulting liquid wort, add wine yeast and yeast feed (the wort can be preheated to 50оC to sterilize it, but before adding the yeast, it must be cooled to a temperature comfortable for CKD). Install a water seal and leave in a warm place until the first precipitation of yeast. Drain the wort from the sediment and add the remaining third of the sugar. After the fermentation is over, drain the young wine from the sediment and transfer it to a cool place under a water seal. Then repeat the procedure from the first cooking option.
American cherry plum homemade wine
- 2,8 kg cherry plum
- 1,4 kg of sugar
- about 4 liters of water
- 1 pack of wine yeast
- 1 tsp feed for yeast
- 1 tsp pectinase *
* Pectinase – an enzyme that breaks down pectin and contributes to a better separation of juice from fruits containing a large amount of pectin (as, for example, in cherry plum). You can easily find it in any wine store. Do not be afraid, this is organic, completely safe for humans (almost all the juices that we buy in the store are prepared using pectinase).
Add 1 liter of water to the washed fruits and crush them with a rolling pin until there are no lumps left. Leave the gruel for 2-3 hours, and then add the rest of the water and pectinase. Cover the wort with gauze and leave for a couple of days in a cool place, then strain through a sieve or cheesecloth. Pour the juice into a saucepan, put on fire, quickly bring to a boil and immediately remove from heat (to sterilize and deactivate pectinase). Pour hot juice over sugar, and then cool it to room temperature. Add yeast and water, if necessary, bring the total volume of wort to 4,5 liters with clean water and install a water seal.
The wine according to this recipe should ferment for 4-6 weeks. Next, we drain the young wine from the sediment and act according to the already worked out scheme from the first part of this article. In general, the American technology for making wine from cherry plum at home is more technologically advanced and requires less effort (it is as close as possible to the classical technology for making wine, for example, grape). At the moment, even the domestic market is already oversaturated with goods for winemakers, so it will not be difficult to get CKD and other components for home winemaking. The only question is, are you ready to master this art in a new way or do everything using the “old-fashioned” methods?