Red dust

[Cycius]

Hello everyone. This year i harvested my little wineyard (4 winetrees, 16 kg total grapes which is good result i guess) maybe a week too early, so the sugar/acid balance was not ideal i guess so. I put smashed grapes to a bucket for 4 days and after that i pressed juice out of it. I fermented wine for 17 days in wine jugs and decided to remove sediment. Fermentation stopped, which is good or bad thing thing i don't know. And "red dust" apeared on the surface of the wine. I guess it's not a good thing, so now i am thinking for a way to solve this. I go for natural fermentatio, no yeast added. So i guess i should remove some wine from surface and add so sugar/water/yeast. I'm not sure yeat.

 

[Ohio Bob]

Hello everyone. This year i harvested my little wineyard (4 winetrees, 16 kg total grapes which is good result i guess) maybe a week too early, so the sugar/acid balance was not ideal i guess so. I put smashed grapes to a bucket for 4 days and after that i pressed juice out of it. I fermented wine for 17 days in wine jugs and decided to remove sediment. Fermentation stopped, which is good or bad thing thing i don't know. And "red dust" apeared on the surface of the wine. I guess it's not a good thing, so now i am thinking for a way to solve this. I go for natural fermentatio, no yeast added. So i guess i should remove some wine from surface and add so sugar/water/yeast. I'm not sure yeat.

It’s hard to say from the picture but it looks harmless, possibly residue from the pressing. If it’s an active fermentation, what was your SG?, then CO2 will attach to particles and float them to the surface.

 

[Rice_Guy]

Wine is a preservative, it has low pH starts with sugar and ends with alcohol. The main risk is an oxygen organism growing producing an off flavor.
We use metabisulphite to add a layer of protection against bacteria. Normally I would say pull the red dust off with a paper towel and examine it. Is it soft / mold like? Is it hard / crystal like? With mold I would then treat with 75 to 100ppm meta to reduce it. If you are organic your number one control is pasteurize the wine as 140F for 40 minutes. Other choices are sterile filtering and removing oxygen in a vacuum capping machine, ,,, but these aren’t good at home.
Red crystal material should not matter. It would likely be related to potassium bitartrate crystals from picking with high acid.

How does your wine taste?