Freezing wine for storage

Has there been any extended testing or feedback on freezing wines?

If this method worked, it would be great (for me). One can decant the full bottle for sediment and drink what you want. Put the remaining back in bottle, cork it, and freeze it. No Coravin or Repour cost, and I have not found Coravin or Repour to preserve the wine 100% either (a bit hit or miss?). This would be another path for Zoom tastings… leave more headspace but freeze the bottle/wrap in aluminum and ship it off. In fact this could be a way for testing it… split the bottle for a zoom session, freezing 1 and not the other… and aluminum wrapping both.

This site, however, suggests that a half bottle of wine that is frozen, will still oxidize: I Accidentally Froze My Wine. Is it Ruined? | VinePair. Not sure how accurate their test was. 1) they froze an entire bottle that burst in the freezer/exposing it to the elements, and 2) they didn’t thaw the entire bottle, so they may have inadvertently changed the ratio of water in the thawed sample.

I’ve done it numerous times, works just fine. Here are some links to previous discussions:

Also have done it with mature and fine wines with good results.

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.

My friend had an experiment with a few wines that were at least partially frozen (corks pushed out to some degree and the wine seemed pretty solid within the bottle, but impossible to say if the wine was fully frozen) and were going to go down the sink. He said he could take the bottles to his cellar for free if they were going to be poured down the drain anyway.

IIRC, these were one Sauternes and one Cru Bordeaux (something like 5eme or 4eme Cru). He managed to source sound bottles of both wines - the same vintages and all - as well and kept the four bottles for some years. Then, at some point he had a blind tasting, and one flight was these four wines: two Sauternes and two red Bdx - half of them frozen, thawed and aged for some years, half of them aged normally.

People never realized they were two and two same wines. The Sauternes seemed very thin and evolved with quite dull nose and somewhat flat mouthfeel, while the sound bottle was as you’d expect a Sauternes to be. The frozen Bordeaux was mistaken for a red Burgundy with some age, because it appeared noticeably evolved and quite translucent in color. Furthermore, the normal bottle was quite tannic, while the frozen one had no discernible tannins whatsoever.

So based on this anecdotal evidence, I wouldn’t go freezing wine for other than cooking purposes.

Agree

I’m agreeing with the general sentiment that the wine doesnt taste the same after freezing. I freeze alot of wine after we host wine dinners at our house cause people generally leave at least 2-3 full bottle equivalents. After freezing red throw tons of sediment and whites get alot of crystals. Even sauternes gets alot of sediment (in fact I have a frozen pint of '88 sauternes in the freezer right now). All of this really changes the wine. Its not undrinkable but it changes it alot. For cooking, however, its fantastic. I even have frozen pre-moxed whites for when I want that nutty/oxidative note in a sauce.

How much of this is the freezing vs the cork being pushed out causing an incomplete seal?

It is hard to say. IIRC, he told me that the corks with both wine pairs looked pretty identical to each other, there was no seepage with the frozen wines and they never even had pushed through the foil, so protruding something like less than an inch, and could be pushed back fully into the neck after the wine thawed.

I’ve never tried it. I know some people like Alan R have had good luck. But even refrigerator temperatures can cause significant precipitation/sediment in some reds over a few weeks. So I would be concerned about freezing.

The chemical constituents of grapes vary widely, so I could imagine it working with some kinds of wines and not with others. Also, I can imagine that the age of the wine could make a difference, because of the changes in its chemistry over time.

Uh… this does cast some doubt on the capacity of these people to carry out any experiment.

I inadvertently freeze partial bottles sometimes when I put them in the freezer to chill down before drinking and forget about them. They definitely don’t taste the same after thawing.

Agreed. I’ve accidentally frozen white wines by forgetting them in the freezer.

If consumed within a day or two, they have been reasonably good wines. Tartrate precipitation would happen in frozen wines that were not tartrate stable, and that would definitely affect acidity. Also, the increase in pH from precipitating tartrates would lessen the efficacy of any sulphites in the wine. Leading to the wines seeming more evolved/aged.

Reds would be a similar situation, and as most reds are tatrate stable to cellar temps, the likelihood of precipitating tartrates is higher. These would definitely have some of the pigments attached. I would not reccomend freezing a red unless you specifically wanted to reduce acidity, and had plenty of color/fruit/tannin to sacrifice to the process.

I would never do this to a lighter pigmented grape, such as Pinot Noir.

I’ve done it accidentally a few times. The cork does get pushed out a bit. I broke off the plug of ice and sealed the bottles.

And I thawed them by keeping them upright in the fridge. When you thaw them, they stratify. The water stays on top, the heavier things sink and you can see the layers. I’ve only done it with whites so don’t know about reds.

I tried to taste the different layers with a straw, but that was pretty hard because it mixed the wine. Still, for science I wanted to taste each layer. I was thinking that if I could just save the bottom layer, I’d have a powerful wine concentrate.

I ended up using the wine for cooking. When I did it with sweet wines, they seemed to hold up a little better. I suppose that is because there is more “stuff” in proportion to the water, not sure.