Brewday: Yellow Plum Wine (Songold Plums)

We keep an eye out in the Supermarkets for reduced fruit on sale. Today in Morrison's there was packs of Songold Yellow plums on half price. Down from £0.49 per 400g to £0.25 per 400g. We picked up 5 punnets for the princely sum of £1.25 for 2kg of fruit.

We are a little short of fruit from what most of the wine recipe books say we need,and last time I made this wine I used 10lb of fruit as it was free at the time. The plum trees that we got them from last year sadly are no longer there.

However Mr C.J.J Berry suggests adding 250g of crushed barley, of which I have loads, to add more body to the wine and only requires 1.75kg of Plums, so we will be following his recipe on Page 182 (Greengage Wine) this time.

This will be my 1st C.J.J Berry wine I have made from his book, so hopefully his excellent reputation in the wine world will produce a equally good wine.

As a quick guess, the sugar will cost around the £2.00 mark, plus the Plums and barley, and including sundries.  I reckon it'll work out around £0.70 per 750 ml bottle.

Put Barley into my 5 litre bucket.

Stoned and cut up the 2kg of Yellow Plums and added them to the bucket.

I think I should have used a bigger bucket for this, ah well. Topped up the bucket to the 5 litre mark on the side with boiling water straight from the kettle, I reckon I got around 3-3.5 litres of water in. Gave it all a good stir and just in case, chucked in 1 crushed campden tablet just to make sure that no wild yeasts and nasties where on the fruit.