Plum wine at home - how to make an aromatic drink for lovers
You can often see plum wine in stores, but homemade drink will be the most natural. Making plum wine at home is simple and easy. And in terms of quality and taste, it will be several times higher and better. Ripe aromatic fruits, sugar and water are all that is required and is included in homemade wine. The same cannot be said about a store product. It often contains not plums, but reconstituted wine material. Therefore, we collect plums in summer and make aromatic wine of rich color and original taste from them.
Selection and preparation of raw materials
As for the choice of the variety, both blue and light fruits are suitable for wine. In the first case, the drink will have a dark ruby color. Yellow plums give it a pleasant straw color. And if you mix both, the wine will be pink.
Collect fruits for wine only when they are fully ripe. You can also use carrion, just make sure you don't get spoiled plums. First, let the fruits sit in the sun for a couple of days (if they were picked from the branches). Then wipe them with a dry cloth.
It is impossible to wash the plums - this way you will wash away the bacteria (fungi) that appear during "aging" under the sun. It is they who contribute to fermentation. A blank made of washed fruits will ferment sluggishly and for a long time. Or it may not happen at all without the addition of yeast.
Plum wine at home - step by step cooking technology
The winemaking process can be divided into 3 stages:
- Cooking wort or how to get plum juice. Remove the seeds from the plums and crush them with a pusher. Add 1: 1 water to the puree and leave warm for 2 days, covered with gauze. Remember to stir every 6 hours. As a result, there will be a layer of released juice in the pan on top. Drain it - that's our wort.
- We send the wort to fermentation by adding sugar. The amount of sugar depends on what kind of wine you want to end up with. For dry, you need less sugar (for 1 liter of juice - 1 tbsp.), For dessert - 1.5 tbsp. Add half of the sugar, stir and pour the blank into the bottle, leaving 1/3 of its volume empty. Install a water seal. Add the remaining half of the sugar in two doses every 5 days. In total, plum wine needs no more than 2 months to ferment.
- We leave the wine to mature. When the fermentation processes are over, pour the billet into glass bottles, trying to remove the sediment. And put them in the cellar to ripen. In general, for plums, this is a lengthy process that takes at least 3 months. During this time, remove the wine from the sediment a couple more times.
Plum wine, especially blue wine, will not be completely transparent. Or you will have to wait up to 3 years until it brightens as much as possible. And such a drink can be stored in a cellar for up to 5 years.