Try This Dry White Bullace Wine Recipe
Bulace are the wild version of green gages and make excellent wine. Pick them as soon as they are ripe from hedgerows and waste land where they grow freely and are ready to pick in August and September. Here is an easy recipe for making Bullace Wine
Ingredients
1.5kg bullace
900 g granulated sugar
juice of 2 lemons
5liters water
1 tsp wine yeast nutrient
Sterile fermentation bucket
campden tablets
Method
Remove all the stalks, leaves and bits of twigs from your Bullce. Wash them well to remove anything that might affect the fermentation process. I use warm soapy water and rinse several times. There is no need to de-stone them.
Put into a deep pan and add half the water. Bring to boil and simmer for thirty minutes. Use a metal potato masher or wooden spoon to crush the plums as they cook. This will help extract all the juice from them.
Remove from heat and pass the liquid through a sieve to remove the solids. Use the back of a wooden spoon to press as much liquid out as possible.
Pour the liquid into your fermentation bucket and throw the solids away.
Add the rest of the water and the sugar to the pan and warm until all the sugar has dissolved. Add the lemon juice. Add as many campden tablets as stated on the packet and stir well, mix with Bullace juice and leave to cool.
Make up yeast starter by adding yeast and a tsp of sugar to 250m of tepid water. Cover and leave for twenty minutes to activate the yeast.
When the liquid is around 40°C add the yeast starter, stir well with sterile spoon. Cover and leave for four days, stir once a day.
Strain the liquid into demi-johns. Fit a bung and sterile fermentation lock into the top of each demi-john. Move into a warm place and leave to ferment. Fermentation is complete when there is no more bubbling.
Syphon the wine into new demi-johns, add bung and fermentation lock. Place somewhere cool and leave to clear. this takes about three months.
When the wine is clear pour it into bottles with corks and store for at least a year.
This is a dry white wine and very enjoyable if made right.
How to Identify and Pick Bullace
How to Identify and Pick Bullace
