"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.