On Aug 28, 7:27 am, Jeff wrote:
On Aug 27, 5:45 pm, Tater wrote:

Do you have to remove the pits? I'd guess they are pretty much inert
anyway. I know that when using cherries (in beer) they generally leave
the pits in to give it a more complex flavor (an almond flavor). I
don't buy the whole cyanide thing - I believe you'd have to consume a
ton (literally?) of pits to be a problem.

Regardless, I'll find out soon enough - I received a bunch of very
ripe pluots (8lbs) and they are in primary at the moment - pits and
all. If you don't hear from me in a year and a half, I was wrong about
the cyanide.

I use the freezing method to breakdown the cell walls with fruit I add
to beer every time. It works very well for that.

A follow up to my own reply - I left my pluots (pits, skins and all)
in the bucket for longer than anticipated, and was figuring that it
would cause a problem. Well, after two weeks, I racked it off the
fruit and into primary and a taste revealed that there were no
problems at all (that I could detect). Quite a bit of pulp seems to
have transferred with the must, but I'm quite pleased with my first go
with making fruit wine (or any wine, for that matter).

It could be that the pluot skins are less of a problem than plums. The
wine is sweeter than I like at this point and will probably never get
dry enough for me, but my wife likes it and it is probably around 15%
alcohol at the moment (SG was 1.004 and I guestimate the original
gravity was around 1.148: 4lbs sugar, 8lbs fruit, and I now have 1.5
gallons of must - I believe I added a wee bit over a gallon of water
to the fruit initially).

I think I'll do a starter of a wine yeast that is known to go pretty
dry (any suggestions?) and add it into the existing must to see how
far it'll dry out. I'm not concerned about it going too dry at this
point because of all the initial sugars. I'm surprised it went as far
as it did because (don't cringe here) 1) I used ale yeast, not wine
yeast and 2) I didn't have any yeast nutrient, so I used yeast
energizer.

--Jeff