What. Is. This.???

This is a bottle of 2015 Baudry, opened couple months ago, forgotten and left in my wine frig…there’s a layer of ‘white powder’ on top…

I have left many bottles unfinished in my life but never seen this.

Looks like mold to me. Maybe you could pair it with some Roquefort?

Looks like surface film yeast given the rugose character of the growth.

If it were “flatter” it’d probably Acetobacter.


You’re well on your way to making Chinon Sherry.

Maybe I’ll bring it to our offline tomorrow.

Open it and sniff the headspace first.
If it reeks of VA then my armchair diagnosis is wrong and you’ve got vinaigre de Chinon.

Afraid to open it!

Could be a good vinegar in a few months…

I’m hoping for the Chinon sherry. Even if that’s mixing two regions. Go for it son - drink up and post a TN!

Nanobots?

That, my fellow forumites, is a textbook example of brett bloom, aka. a pellicle. Apparently there has been some brett in the wine, but it has been stunned out by the lack of oxygen and a small dose of sulfites.

Once the wine is opened, the sulfites start disappearing (they get bound by compounds that form upon oxidation) and once the sulfite levels have dropped low enough, brett wakes up and in the presence of oxygen starts gobbing up whatever fermentable there’s left in the wine.

Well, good thing you didn’t step in it!

That’d be one hell of a Brett growth.
Any particular reason why you’d think it Brett instead of any of the garden variety SFYs?

Haven’t you heard, Otto!?! Baudry doesn’t have brett.

Possibly mycoderma

https://www.bacchus-barleycorn.com/catalog/article_info.php?articles_id=25

I’m with Bruce guessing that’s a surface film yeast. Pull the cork and I’d bet you smell VA.

Just because a) it looks pretty much what you can at times witness in the neck of an Orval bottle (and the wine had good few months of time to develop that bloom); b) because Baudry’s wines can at times show signs of brett.

Of course it can be any other SFY, but that’d require those yeasts to get into the bottle, whereas it’s pretty likely to have the brett there already. However, you’re right in that there’s no reason why it couldn’t be any other yeast surface film. I just thought that brett would be the most probable option here.

Oh yeah, this.

IDK because but it looks to me like lees. If the wine hadn’t finished fermenting and it had a micrón of yeast and RS it would restart the fermentation process all over. Years ago, I had some wine in my warehouse that popped its cork and did look similar. Was totally oxidized.

Lees doesn’t sound right to me. Yeast lees can be in suspension in the wine but usually they drop to the bottom once the fermentation is over. They don’t float up to the surface, unless fermentation (=CO2) is helping them. To me that definitely looks like a pellicle i.e. a biofilm which an aerobic, surface film-forming yeast creates to increase its oxygen intake.

Otto:

Thanks for the feedback.
Surface film yeasts are ubiquitous. Looking at some of the genera involved–Pichia, Candida, Hansenula, and good ol’ Saccharomyces spp.-- I think it’s safe to say that more than likely every unfiltered bottle of wine contains a goodly amount of them.
All they need is the proper environment for growth, that being oxygen, a carbon source (usually alcohol), and a lack of stress (ie., sufficiently low SO2 levels).

Brett isn’t all that hungry for oxygen, and lives and reproduces quite readily under anaerobic conditions. Hence, the wonderful surprise when a favorite wine has gone all Bretty with bottle age.
So, I’d be surprised to see such a vigorous Brett film growth in a few short months, especially given that there would probably be limited substrates (that Brett would normally use) in a dry red wine.

Your comment re: Orval gets one to thinking, though…

Regards,

What a bunch of nerds!