I’ve mentioned before just how many plum trees there are in our garden. We used many of their plums in jams and chutneys, but I’m sad to say we struggled to keep up. Part of the problem was that most of the trees are self-seeded, and so close together that they have grown quite leggy and all of the branches are out of reach. I’d often come out to the garden of an evening and find a mass of plums had fallen, burst and been like that in the summer sun all day. In these conditions mother nature had started to brew her own wine, and that familiar smell of active yeast got us thinking.

So we turned to Brian Leverett’s Winemaking Month by Month book for inspiration, and before long we were up to our old tricks and making some more fruit wine. Leverett says that plums alone produce a very thin wine, and he recommends adding crushed wheat to the must. But he does go on to say that plum wine can also be made without the wheat by following his greengage wine recipe (but using plums instead of greengages). We didn’t have any wheat, so we tried that. As long as it tastes nice, a thin plum wine must be better than rotting plums in the garden.

It was quite a simple recipe, using only plums, sugar, yeast and water. We followed the instructions and five days after mixing the ingredients in a fermenting bin, we transferred the liquid into a demijohn. At this point we had the opportunity to sample a little, and were pleasantly surprised. It was still quite sweet, as there was a lot of sugar yet to be fermented, but it tasted very nice indeed. Hopefully a sign of things to come.

The plum wine must on day 1

The same must on day 5, just before we transferred it to a demijohn

This has been a very active wine, bubbling away for a couple of weeks now and still going strong. It’s an interesting colour at the moment too. I’m quite excited by this year’s homebrewed wines, based on the small quantities I’ve sampled during the brewing process . I’m not sure what to expect from July’s carrot wine (I couldn’t taste anything but alcohol), but both the apricot wine and this plum wine have left me expecting great things. Perhaps that’s the Brian Leverett effect, I should probably have followed his carrot wine recipe too.

Our plum wine in a demijohn