This afternoon I finally managed to get the rosé wine bottled. I decided to use my collection of Belgian beer bottles, sealed with crown caps, which means we can open enough for a test without having to use up a 75cl bottle over the next day or so. I got 11 330ml bottles out of the demijohn, so ~3.6l, which would have been about 4.8 regular wine bottles. We’ll probably wait until April or May for the first sample (the last one to be bottled, which may be slightly cloudy) and leave a month or so between each bottle after that until we decide it is good to drink.

In the end, I chose not to backsweeten any of the bottles by adding a sugar syrup. If my potassium sorbate dose didn’t kill off any residual yeast, there should still be nothing for it to work on to create carbonation. One tip I did see online was that you can also sweeten at the point of drinking by adding an easily dissolvable sugar, like icing sugar. If some or all of them turn out too sweet, I’ll try that as a strategy.