Strictly Plumtonic Wine and Mead: more photos

Here are some more pictures from making plum wine, again courtesy of Kierston:

Kathryn and I are crushing some plums (and drinking Carnot Cabernet):

A really nice close-up of the plums from Kathryn's tree:

Me covered in plum pulp:

Kathryn, me, and Kierston crushing more plums:

Here's what seven pounds of pulp looks like:

Carnot Cabernet: More photos from the vinification

Throughout the Carnot Cabernet fermentation process, Kierston has been taking some awesome pictures. Here's a few of the best.

Me adding the concentrate to the fermenter for the first time:

Forrest checking the specific gravity of the concentrate:

Close-up of the yeast added to the juice concentrate:

The oak float:

Racked to the carboy for secondary fermentation:

Forrest adding a stabilizer to the wine:

The wine degassing:

Gryphy, Burdell Cellars' mascot, keeping her watchful eye on the wine as it fines and clarifies:

Mini-Mead: A Lesson Learned

Last month, I took care of Forrest and Kierston's cat while they were away for a week. As a thank-you gift, they gave me this amazing "redneck wine glass," which is in fact a mason jar attached to a stem. I decided to use it to pursue a little side project, Oak Barrel's "mini-mead" recipe. It's two parts clover honey to one part water, with a little acid to liven it up. I used some leftover yeast and yeast nutrient from our plum wine.

Here's what it looked like when everything was mixed together. The mason jar has a tight seal, which prevents contamination but builds up pressure easily. Unfortunately, I didn't have the luxury of an airlock, which meant I had to vent every day, then seal it again, shake to mix up the yeast and gas, then vent again for good measure.






After keeping up that protocol for a few weeks, the foaming kept getting stronger every time I shook my mini-mead. That's a good sign--it means the fermentation is working--but it also means the vessel was getting more pressurized. So when I took a trip to Boston to visit Steph, I had to choose between sealing the container and risk breaking it (and getting a mead puddle on my carpet) or leaving it open a crack and risk contamination. I decided losing a batch of mead was worse then losing my awesome redneck wine glass...

...and when I came back, it was brown and nasty. My glass was intact, fortunately, but my batch of mead was sadly ruined. Lesson learned: buy an airlock for your fermentations.

"Strictly Plum-tonic" Plum Wine and Mead

In between bottling our Carnot Cabernet and waiting for our batch of Grenache grapes to show up, we embarked on a side project: a "plum tonic" wine and mead. Our friend Kathryn has a plum tree in her backyard, and by early August, the fruit had become so ripe it was literally falling off the tree.

So we picked a whole lot of plums.

A few days later, we crushed around 7 pounds of plums. We planned to use about half for a plum wine (adding sugar) and the other half for plum mead (adding wildflower honey). Here's what 7 pounds of plums looks like, crushed and pits removed but with skins and pulp still in there.

We added some boiling water to bring the total volume up to 2 gallons. The water helps to draw remaining juice off the skins and sterilize the batch.

A day later, once the batch had cooled back down to room temperature, we used a strainer to filter out the remaining skins and pulp. Here's what it looks like once it was clarified a bit.

Next, we measured out 3.5 pounds of sugar and honey for the wine and mead batches.

Then, we mixed together the clarified plum juice and the sugar...

...and put a gallon of each into a glass jug, along with the usual yeast and nutrient, for fermentation.

We did it as scientifically as possible, making each batch identically except for using honey in one and sugar in the other, so it'll be interesting to see how they turn out. We ended the primary fermentation a few days ago, racking to new jugs and discarding the yeast and remaining plum sediment. After a few more months of fermentation, the mead and wine should be ready to drink, perhaps a lovely winter beverage if everything works out like we're hoping.