Juiced some plums for a plum wine

[TandemTails]

Some friends have a plum tree that was going absolutely crazy with plums this year. I picked and filled a 4 gallon bucket with plums to make my first plum wine.

I pitted and juiced those plums which yielded a little over 1 gallon of juice. To that I added 4lb sugar and water up to 2.5 gallons. I ended up with a starting gravity of 1.096 which should get me a wine of about 12.5% abv.

I added 2.5 crushed campden tablets 12 hours ago to kill off the wild yeast and will add some Aurora Kveik in about 12 more hours.

When I pitch the yeast I'll add 1/4 tsp malic acid and 1/4 tsp citric acid. I plan on using the Tonsa 3.0 schedule where I'll add a total of 8g fermaid-o over 4 additions until the 1/3 sugar break.

 

[Yooper]

I probably wouldn't add acid- unless you have some sort of plums lacking in acid. My plum wine is so highly acidic that I had to dilute with water at the beginning, and even then it had such a high acidity that I had to use potassium carbonate to try to lower that acidity a bit. It wasn't a bad wine, but plums were a disappointment to me without extra measures. The next year, I titrated the acids before hand, and dropped the acid before fermentation and it was better (but not great) but definitely would taste better sweetened.

 

[TandemTails]

I probably wouldn't add acid- unless you have some sort of plums lacking in acid. My plum wine is so highly acidic that I had to dilute with water at the beginning, and even then it had such a high acidity that I had to use potassium carbonate to try to lower that acidity a bit. It wasn't a bad wine, but plums were a disappointment to me without extra measures. The next year, I titrated the acids before hand, and dropped the acid before fermentation and it was better (but not great) but definitely would taste better sweetened.

Thanks for the suggestion. Maybe i'll take a pH reading before adding the yeast and see what it's at and then decide what to do. I plan on stabilizing and then back sweetening with some extra plum juice that I reserved and probably a little extra sugar as well.

This is my first wine, but i've been making mead, cider and beer for a while. I've been basing this a lot on how I handle my meads although i never add acid to those.

 

[Yooper]

You can always add acid at the end if needed but plum wines generally won't need extra acid at all.

Instead of a pH reading, you can use a titration kit to get the TA, and that's more helpful than a pH reading.

 

[Maylar]

Acid adjustments are best done before bottling - at the very end of the process.

 

[Blacksmith1]

Using a bottled pomegranate/plum juice and a black cherry/plum as well, both came out very acidic at the end all on their own.