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Storing open bottles in the freezer

Cathy Gowdie

Chill wine by placing it in a bucket with lots of ice and some cold salty water.
Chill wine by placing it in a bucket with lots of ice and some cold salty water.Jennifer Soo

When I don't quite finish a bottle, can I keep it fresh by freezing it? American boffins seem to suggest I can.

Let us toast the boffins, for a life in science is filled with rigours. Picture the grilling these highly qualified researchers surely copped from the grants committee reviewing their funding application. ''Tell us again, Professor Cirrhosis: you want how many thousand dollars, to buy how much booze?'' Think of the heroic restraint the research team exercised in not quite finishing all the bottles; and the difficulty of observing and recording the results after a long day's imbibing, bringing new resonance to the term ''blind trial''.

OK, so the experiment probably didn't work like that, and I'm not familiar with the study. But, happily, I have some experience in this area - all of it accidental. It involves placing unopened bottles of white in the freezer in the hope of a rapid chill, forgetting them until the wine is frozen solid, then cursing aloud the following evening on finding them with popped closures leaking slushy mess. A better woman would chill the wine by placing it in a bucket with lots of ice and some cold salty water, which is arguably faster and certainly less risky (although it could lead to a shortage of ice for gin and tonic).

Is it a good idea to freeze wine? There's probably not much harm in freezing and gently thawing a reasonably simple fresh wine. With some whites, you may notice little, if any, difference in the flavour or mouthfeel. What you probably will notice is a heap of white sparkly stuff at the base of the bottle, where low temperatures have made tartaric acid in the wine form crystals. The same thing can happen with reds, although when the crystals are coloured red, they can look like ordinary sediment. Either way, they're harmless.

I feel less sanguine about freezing complex, well-aged wines - there are so many factors that contribute to their flavour that freezing may shock them and upset their fine balance. If you don't fancy buying one of the array of wine-saving gadgets on the market, you would do best to just seal the bottle and leave it in the fridge for a night or two - this goes for red wine as well as white. Be sure to store the bottle upright, not on its side, to minimise the surface exposed to air. And if there's only one glass left, drink up.

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