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8/08/2018

Wed, the 8 of August 2018

 

Plum & Apricot Wine

Plum & Apricot Wine

After my SugraOne wine has finished its first stage, I got some chance to experiment with plums and apricots, and to see what kind of wine could come out of these.


So I went to the New Spitalfields Market and got hold of some 70 kg of apricots as well as around 40 kg of English Plum.

First of all, one must take all the stones away. This is a must. If you fail to do so, your wine will be, I would say, extremely toxic.

For juice extraction I tried three different methods, that in essence gave pretty much the same results.

Mashing apricots with a masher Mashing apricots with a masher
First, as you see, I tried simple mashing with a usual potator masher. It didn't work very well and it was time consuming as well. I would say that this is the most time consuming method, and I would not use it again.

The second choice was to use a juice extractor. It was much better than mashing, and it created a fine puree or as they call it, nectar.

One must say that you cannot really extract a pure juice from either apricots or plums, unless you using some special kind of a press, which would give you very little of juice and a lot of waste. Also, if you want to make a really rich wine, you must use everything that the fruit contains, apart from stones, of course.

The third way was just to use a blender in order to create nectar, and it did work for me. And I think that from now on this would probably be my most preferable way of making apricot, plum, peach or similar wine.

However, this is still and experiment, and in order to find out which of the above methods will give me most of final wine I put them in the two separate bottle with appropriate marking as you can see on the picture below, and as you can see the purees in both jars look almost identical.
Plum & Apricot Wine The nectar in both bottles looks exactly the same


So, by using these methods I got around 45 liters of apricot nectar, 33 of which was used for wine, and from the plums I extracted about 23 liters of nectar. About 6 kg of sugar was added to the 33 liters of the apricot nectar, and about 5 kg of sugar was mixed with plum nectar.

All the sugar had been mixed in the nectar itself, which means no water had been added. I never add any water to any of my wines, as I want the wine to be very rich.

After having added sugar, the gravity of the apricot as well as plum syrups was 20%, as shown here, on the picture.
Plum & Apricot Wine The gravity at start for apricot & plum wine was 20%


However, for the sake of experimenting I used some of this plum and apricot syrup in a one to one mix with my SugraOne wine, that has just finished its first stage. It is very interesting what will come out of this mix. I am not a heavy drinker, and thus I always prefer to have a greater variety of wine rather than greater amount of it.

And here, the Excel file shows where I am currently standing with all my wine this year so far:
home wine Stats file

Visitor comments:

У четвер, 16 серпня 2018 Ivanna запитали:
Як то цікаво! Ви на всі руки майстер! А коли вино буде готово?
У четвер, 16 серпня 2018 Victor написали:
Не знаю. Найшвидше може збродити за два тижні, але часом може бродити кілька місяців.

 






You may also find interesting my previous wine making articles as follows:


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