Thank you for the links. Missed them. I summarized below what I quickly saw as the experience of those who tried to run some sort of comparative test:
No Impact
Opened a 2013 Ollieux Romanis ‘Atal Sia’ Friday night - drank half and put the bottle in the freezer. Thawed the remainder this evening - no degradation or oxidation whatsoever - it picked up right where it left off on Friday and drank very nicely.
Other than sometimes some precipitation of tartrates(?) in white wines, I find that freezing is an excellent preservative, as one would intuitively expect. We do indeed consume the wine very soon after thawing, and it is just fine.
Negative Impact
Freezing the wine will cause tartrates to crystalize and will change the acid perception of the wine. I’ve had a number of wines, Raveneau Chablis for example, that had tartrates form and the wine was noticeably different (multiple identical bottles, some with tartrates, some not). The flavors were probably identical, but changing the acidity in any noticeable way makes this hard to confirm. Oh, and cold stabilizing a wine causes some of the wine’s colloids to drop out of suspension (colloids are tiny suspended particles that never settle, mostly lees), so that’ll affect the wine…mostly the texture, but might affect the flavors. it’ll be similar to the just opened, but not the same.
If not perfect, certainly not damaged, and for a partial I would believe that this might yield a better save than pretty much anything but a coravin(which isn’t perfect either, IMO).
With red wine when stored too cold or even freezing it can happen that colour pigments will fall out and sink down to the bottom. So the wine will lose colour. I have two or three bottles like this in the cellar (auction purchases) of an orange colour. Also once I received a Grand Cru Burgundy (Bonnes Mares Vogüe) 1957 as a present … almost de-coloured, but cloudy. When I left it standing upright for weeks it was completely a white wine with heavy red sediment 1 cm thick. It was a great white wine, but nothing reminded us of a Bonnes-Mares.
I let it warm up to look temperate alongside a glass from the completely unfrozen bottle, and the two bouquets still seemed to be different
Based only on a small handful of occasions when whites have been accidentally left in the freezer too long, I have in most instances found the wines disheveled and severely altered. Wines that have remained frozen for a few hours up to a few days and then thawed in room temperature and opened have had acid/sugar balance altered and seemed slightly disintegrated, almost undrinkable compared to their normal state. I can’t explain why, but kind of strange to see many others with almost opposite stories.