What's that stuff in my carboy?

Andrew -

You are (understandably) obsessing over insignificant nuances of your fermenting liquid. We have all done this when beginning winemaking. Truth is, it is actually fairly hard to totally screw up a wine if you follow basic cleanliness guidelines. The stuff you are seeing is probably just yeast. It does tend to gum up on the walls of the carboy near the surface

*sometimes* and it does no harm. Usually as a ferment gets near its end I will agitate the carboy a bit to stir up the lees and possibly encourage them to eat a bit more sugar. If there's yeast 'film' on the glass then I'll try to get it to go back into the liquid. But it's of no consequence if it does not.

If the wine was sulfited, and is still fermenting with a reasonable head of CO2 (take a sniff!), you have little to worry about in terms of spoilage of this new wine. The ferment itself is actually the safest phase for wine; it is protected by CO2 which tends to ward off oxygen and the outgassing via the airlock presents a constant pressure away from the liquid. Things are much more critical when the wine is aging, and is still. That's when you need to take care to have the right amount of free SO2 and keep it topped up.

Roger Quinta do Placer

Right again. Thx. for helping,

Andrew

Andrew, I agree with Roger to a point, but here is another thought. 'White' is odd. Yeast debris in a red is usually pink, tan in a white wine. If you added something to the wine maybe that's what it is.

With all that CO2 in there it's hard to imagine any bacterial infection but I can't think of anything that 'should' be white in a wine.

I would wipe it out, or if it's a film on top, just top up to overflowing and let it get rid of itself. Then get some wine back out if necessary and shake the carboy to fill the headspace back up with CO2.

Joe