Should I be worried

[EmptyBottleKW]

Hi all,

I am a fairly new wine maker and I have made many Niagara mist kit wines that turn out fantastic.

BUT I also try and make regular wine from 5 G grape juice I buy from a wine making supplier.

Now my last couple of carboys have had this growth on-top of the wine. The wine has been aging for a few months in large carboys with very little air and an air lock filled with sanitizer. Should I be chucking this?

The growth is very dry and falls easily apart when disturbed.

 

[salcoco]

since it is not crystalline in shape I lean towards some bacterial growth. have you followed any so2 protocol? have you tasted the wine? f okay I would add water so that -whatever it is- floats out of the carboy. rack the wine into a clean and sulphited carboy. one that is very very clean then add 1 tsp of k-meta for the five gallons. in future insure any tools and the carboy have been sanitized I take 3 grams of powder k-meta, 11 grams of citric acid add one gallon of water. put in spray bottle and spray any tool that contacts wine.

 

[EmptyBottleKW]

I am very thorough with cleaning and sanitizing. It usually takes me more time to santize than it does to actually work with the wine.

The wine initially had too much air when this first grew. I then transferred it a couple of times to new carboys and added marbles till I had less than half an inch of air. I also added some meta.

The wine doesn't taste off or acidic.

 

[Rice_Guy]

Yes you should be concerned.
* you could have dirty glass or tubing which harbors the organism.
* my first guess would be that this is a type of yeast, it’ morphology is smooth and shiny. I would assume that you have good pH and free SO2. We employ a series of fences to prevent infection ,,, example exclude air, remove sugar, grow alcohol, add metabisulphite, carbonate, add known yeast cultures.

I would treat this as if acetobacter and hope, remove cell mass with a paper towel, ,, slowly add grain alcohol ,,, spray with sulphite sanitizer

welcome to WMT