Help! Brown fungus growing on top of kiwifruit wine durring secondary fermentation!

Today while inspecting my 19L of kiwifruit wine that is happily bubbling through secondary fermentation inside a glass carboy, I noticed that there are small round spots of dark brown starting to grow on top of it!

This is the first infection of any type that I have had to combat, And I have no real idea of what to do!

I would hate to loose all 19L of it.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

Rack from underneath and treat with Camden .

And always, but always, keep it topped up. If you've got mold, you may or may not fix it with campden but you can try. If the wine is topped up appropriately, mold can't grow due to the lack of oxygen.

on closer inspection I believe that the growth was brobaby bacteria rather then mould. in any case, something dark growing in circles on top of my brew.

I have sucked up what I could with a syphon hose (I do not have a spare vessel to rack too) and added ample campden, plan to re pitch yeast tomorrow. but interestingly several hours later the air lock is still bubbling.

When I added the campden the brew fizzed violently for a couple of seconds. I have never seen a brew react like that to campden before!

ok. so its now 20 hours later and the brew is still bubbling constantly. I added 7 campden tablets!

What does this mean and how should I proceed?

Maybe I should rack to several small containers before returning to the fermentation vessel and then campden again, and if it keeps bubbling just leave it without pitching new yeast? I just don't know :/

Please help!

What's the problem? You wanted it to ferment, and its doing its job. NOTHING except pasteurizing it will stop it from fermenting. Camden kills wild yeast and bacteria, NOT wine yeasts. It also helps prevent oxidization. If you keep adding camden, you will start tasting it.

Thanks Bluespark. that helps a lot. I was under the impression that Campden was hostile to all yeasts and bacteria. A blanket steriliser if you will. So I have learnt something today.

So you are saying that adding campden does not effect wine yeast negatively at all? If this is the case I will be changing my general procedures in the future given this knowledge.

Also, given this, is campden disolved in water suitable for sterilisation of equipment? I thought it was, and have been using it as such which may have been a mistake?

bregiz said:

So you are saying that adding campden does not effect wine yeast negatively at all? If this is the case I will be changing my general procedures in the future given this knowledge.

Click to expand...

It's not that sulfites (campden) doesn't affect wine yeast at all- in huge amounts it does stress the yeast. But in huge amounts, you can taste it.

In huge amounts, it's used as a sanitizer (not sterilizer) as it kills many/most microbes at larger amounts.

That's why you use such a large amount of sulfite in water as a sanitizer, but a much smaller amount (about 50 ppm) in wine must as an antioxidant and preservative.

I don't know how many campden tablets you'd need to use them as a santizer- a lot. Most people who use sulfites as santizer use the powdered potassium metabisulfite since it's stronger than the tablet version, which are made as an antioxidant/preservative and not for sanitizer.

Good to know. Progress! I think under campden sanitising may be what resulted in this infection...

At least I am learning.