Uh, what? Doesn't this sound like horrible advice?

http://www.winespectator.com/drvinny/show/id/49730

I NEVER read this segment of their website, but this caught my eye.
My experience is that this is HORRIBLE advice, and worse, freezing wine can push out the cork. WTF?
(I don’t think you need to be a subscriber to click the link)

Did you read the article? It is talking about preserving already-opened wine, and it specifically says to make sure to leave room for the frozen wine to expand.

This works really well, by the way. Say you open a good bottle the night before you go out of town for a week, and you have half the bottle left. Unless you have Coravin, freezing it is the best way to preserve it for when you get back home.

Ian,

It’s a terrible way to store an unopened bottle - the bottle will shatter, or, at a bare minimum, the cork will get pushed out. But…I have experimented with it with bottles that are half full and if anything gets lost as the wine thaws, it is almost impossible to tell. Years ago I did experiments with bottles of a restaurant’s higher end house Chardonnay, and no one on staff could tell the difference between a glass poured from frozen bottle and a freshly opened bottle once they came to the same temperature.

I do it primarily with cooking wine, but it’s a more effective way to extend the life of a bottle than you might think. You will get some tartrate crystals at the bottom of the bottle.

I did, and apparently my dyslexia kicked in. I misread the part about the already opened.

I’ve had wine that was frozen, and it really tasted bland after the fact. I’ve put wine in the fridge, and that helped it, but in the freezer was no good for me.

Not at all. The only reason to freeze wine is to preserve left over wine for later consumption. Certain varietals are more susceptible to oxidation and would not be enjoyable later. The only downside of freezing is increased precipitation of tartrate crystals which can be decanted off so a thawed wine will have less acidity but this is not detrimental to the taste. This is not not my primary preservation method but when I have a party or a wine dinner and multiple bottles have a glass or 2 left over, I throw them in the garage freezer and thaw them out later when I just want a glass or 2 instead of a whole bottle. I hate to waste good wine and this is one of the ways I avoid waste.

Hmmmm…not heard of this before, Mont. Could you elaborate as to which varitials?? Do you have any idea why that would be?
I would expect wines that are more susceptible to oxidation would be a function of winemaking technique, rather than variety.

Tom, it’s because high-end French and Italian wines are not varietal.

Unless you count Brettanomyces as a varietal.

Brettanomyces is a fungal.

Thank you for fighting the good fight.

For me, freezing leftover wine works really well. It was my standard way of preserving open bottles until I bought a Coravin.

I recently defrosted a half-full bottle of Fevre Chablis, which had probably been frozen for at least 6 months. It tasted just fine, but there indeed was crystalline sediment at the bottom of the bottle – which hadn’t been there originally.

Ben

Tannin concentration would be my guess.

I have done this occasionally with good results. Use it a lot for cooking wine, but also sometimes if i want to open multiple bottles for a few friends and have many leftovers, they go in the freezer.

I am not sure the sediment present in defrosted wine is tartrate crystals, as the article suggests. In my experience, it’s not a crystallized “shard”-like deposit at all, but rather sludgy - requiring the defrosting process to occur with the bottle upright if you don’t want to be drinking sludge. On the other hand, the result does seem to dull the wine’s acidity so maybe he is right that it’s tartaric acid that’s precipitating out. Still, I’m not sure what accounts for the difference between the muddy deposit from the freezer method and the crystallized deposit that occurs otherwise.

I’ve frozen wine a lot over the years - with always pretty good results. It does mute the nose, but what do you do when you have bottles you can’t drink and the bottles are three quarters full -

I remember doing a first growth tasting back in the early 90s, and ended up with almost full bottles of '83 Margaux, 70 Latour and 82 La Mission for example - ended up freezing them for a couple of months and then “defrosting” them one night. They were still fully intact and drinking beautifully after being chambered that entire day. Actually did this with a '29 Latour once - and that held as well -

Did the same thing with all three GAJA Crus that were almost full - again pulled them out a few weeks later and they were in fine shape.

Sometimes, it’s the only thing you can do to preserve the wine.

I can’t explain it scientifically, but I can’t imagine freezing a wine, and having something separate from it and that NOT having an impact on the wine. As I noted, I don’t buy this freezing thing b/c I’ve had frozen wine that was brought back to a drinkable temp, and it tasted very dull.

It’s my understanding that the cold stabilization of tartaric acid crystals in wine is very imprecise. The crystals can precipitate out of solution when a wine freezes even if the wine has previously been cold stabilized and earlier crystals removed.

Well played. I guess this will be part of Merkel’s argument when she decides to annex Alsace.

Wasn’t it just yesterday that you guys were debating the merits of aerating wines with one of these: