My plums are ripe. taste great and I've already gathered enough to
make a half batch of wine(if i wished)

thing is, they are a pain to pit. local wineshop told me to freeze
them to help macerate(masticate? crush) sould i do this with the pits
in? is there an easy way to pit plums? I'd assume boiling them would
help, but that might draw out icky stuff from the pits

I made a plum wine with very ripe victoria plums last year. I simply
crushed them in my hands and the stones came right out as I squeezed
each one. The stones were quite sharp so I ended up with a few little
cuts. Some latex gloves would probably have afforded me enough
protection though... I made 30 bottles and had very tired hands, so I
guess you'd be well off doing them in several batches if you were to
use this method.

Jim

On Aug 27, 10:45 pm, Tater > wrote:
> My plums are ripe. taste great and I've already gathered enough to
> make a half batch of wine(if i wished)
>
> thing is, they are a pain to pit. local wineshop told me to freeze
> them to help macerate(masticate? crush) sould i do this with the pits
> in? is there an easy way to pit plums? I'd assume boiling them would
> help, but that might draw out icky stuff from the pits

Hard to answer three top posts Tater, but here are some thoguhts;

* I made plum wine (sweet) this year. I modified a Jack Keller recipe
(and strongly recommend checking his recipes over). * The math sounds
about right. The plums actually produce very little juice - you need
significant water for each gallon of wine, and will be adding
significant sugar, acid, tannin, etc. Ata glance, without referring
back to my own notes, I think I used a little less than 20 pounds of
fruit and ended up, after racking and straining, with 2 1/2 gallons of
wine - although had been planning on 3 gallons. There is a lot of
fruit pulp that racks / strains off and takes considerable juice /
wine with it* We judged plums simply by feel, just as you would for
eating
* I do not recommend boiling - you're likely to create all kinds of
strange flavors * We simply cut the stones out. Using pectic enzyme,
the flesh breaks down and will have to be strained out later in
fermentation. We cut and prepared about 60 pounds of fruit. Took a few
hours, but wasn't a big hassle - just needed a bottle of wine to
accompany the task!

Observation on the aging wine; it has an absolutely WONDERFUL nose.
Exquisite. But the taste is yet harsh. Keller points out in his site
that some of these plum wines take time to mellow with age. So I'm
'bulk aging' in one gallon jars indefinitely.


In article
.com>Tater
> wrote:
> My plums are ripe. taste great and I've already gathered enough
> tomake a half batch of wine(if i wished)

> thing is, they are a pain to pit. local wineshop told me to freeze
> them to help macerate(masticate? crush) sould i do this with the pits
> in? is there an easy way to pit plums? I'd assume boiling them
> wouldhelp, but that might draw out icky stuff from the pits


--
I'm using an evaluation license of nemo since 94 days.
You should really try it!
http://www.malcom-mac.com/nemo

I processed this year 200 kilo plums.

I washed them first in a bath with household soda and then
with sulphite.

Then I put them in a bucket and mash them with a potato masher.
Works great and I had no pits crushed !!!
Please take care examining the pits as if they are crushed they may
introduce cyanide in the wine (almond smlee and taste),
But with my plums the pits were so hard and almost impossible to crush.

Juice is released almost immediately.
But that depends on the sort you are using.
Add lots of pecto enzyme.

For details look at my web-log entry:
http://wijnmaker.web-log.nl/wijn_web.../22/index.html

Succes
Luc

On Mon, 27 Aug 2007 14:45:28 -0700, Tater wrote:

> My plums are ripe. taste great and I've already gathered enough to
> make a half batch of wine(if i wished)
>
> thing is, they are a pain to pit. local wineshop told me to freeze
> them to help macerate(masticate? crush) sould i do this with the pits
> in? is there an easy way to pit plums? I'd assume boiling them would
> help, but that might draw out icky stuff from
> thttp://wijnmaker.web-log.nl/wijn_weblog/2007/07/22/index.htmlhe pits

On Aug 27, 5:45 pm, Tater > wrote:
> My plums are ripe. taste great and I've already gathered enough to
> make a half batch of wine(if i wished)
>
> thing is, they are a pain to pit. local wineshop told me to freeze
> them to help macerate(masticate? crush) sould i do this with the pits
> in? is there an easy way to pit plums? I'd assume boiling them would
> help, but that might draw out icky stuff from the pits

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.

--Jeff

update

On Aug 27, 4:45 pm, Tater > wrote:
> My plums are ripe. taste great and I've already gathered enough to
> make a half batch of wine(if i wished)

That must have been monday(checks date), yep. now I have enough for a
full batch once i figure out how to pit them. one of the 7 plum trees.
looks to be about 25% harvested, with the rest not yet ripe.

Next year I am cutting the trees in half. no point in having plums if
they are 15 feet off the ground. hope fully with half a tree and a
whole root system that means they'll make bigger plums

> thing is, they are a pain to pit. local wineshop told me to freeze
> them to help macerate(masticate? crush) sould i do this with the pits
> in? is there an easy way to pit plums? I'd assume boiling them would
> help, but that might draw out icky stuff from the pits

This is still an issue. will thaw a batch i froze to see how well that
worked. someone mentioned using an applesauce maker, although that
takes the skins also, but i could pick the skins from the pits without
issue. comments?

last year plums were ripe for about 2.5 weeks, at about 2 gallons a
day that i am harvesting, this means i *should* have 35 gallons of
plums. I really hope not. I really really hope not.

storage space is becomming an issue.

another update

On Aug 29, 6:11 pm, Tater > wrote:
> update
> This is still an issue. will thaw a batch i froze to see how well that
> worked. someone mentioned using an applesauce maker, although that
> takes the skins also, but i could pick the skins from the pits without
> issue. comments?

an appleasuce maker works!!!!!, picked up a funnel and pestle type
thing and that worked fairly well. a bit faster than hand pitting, but
quite a bit messier. pulp into a bucket and picking skins out of the
funnel and setting pits aside to grow more plum trees(must be a
masochist), 30 pounds in about 3 hours. I want to get a hand crank
type that my mom used to have, I think that will work better.

> last year plums were ripe for about 2.5 weeks, at about 2 gallons a
> day that i am harvesting, this means i *should* have 35 gallons of
> plums. I really hope not. I really really hope not.
> storage space is becomming an issue.

as in other post, started batch today. freezer now almost empty for
next weeks crop. Esitmate that i'll be doing 15-30 gallons
total(75-150 bottles!) pruning with a vengeance after this season, as
bushes are too tall. wheeee!!!!!

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