Frozen wine can you drink it

Is it still fine to drink? The answer: Welcome to winter in the Great White North. Mercifully, your wine should still be okay. Many liquids are reasonably tolerant to freezing. Fruit juice and milk, for example, suffer little. It's the same with wine. Some people maintain they can taste a difference, but any change in flavour will be extremely subtle. Or perhaps, in an attempt to quickly cool a bottle to a more desirable temperature, you have left your wine in the freezer too long, only to discover a wine slushy in the morning.

Should you drink it, or is it destined for the trash? While we understand these accidents happen, and we hate to waste perfectly good food or drink especially wine! While thawed wine is perfectly safe to drink, purposely freezing wine can have some less than fantastic consequences.

First of all, the wine will expand as it freezes. This means that before long the wine will either leak out around the cork, completely push the cork out, or smash the bottle.

Secondly, if the cork is pushed out in the freezer, air will enter the bottle and oxidize your wine. Oxidation can also occur if liquid breaks the airtight seal. Another reason not to freeze wine is to preserve the flavor. Freezing causes the organic chemical compounds in wine to crystalize, which can change the flavor of the wine. Finally, while freezing white, dessert or red wine should leave you pretty unscathed, freezing sparkling wine is dangerous.

Like other sediments, they often sink to the bottom of the bottle, so you can pour slowly and leave them in the bottom — the punt — of the bottle. You also can pour through a coffee filter. Or just drink the wine, crystals and all. All that said, freezing wine is not a best practice. There is no reason to freeze an unopened bottle of wine. If you are preserving a partially consumed bottle, the temperature in your refrigerator can buy you several days, although the wine likely will be less lively and bright the next time you pour.

The wine from the fridge was, as expected, fine. We slurped some up with a spoon for a taste test before trying the refrigerated bottle. The busted slushie from the bottle tasted bitter, and more watery when compared to the refrigerated bottle.

It was also less fruity and less fresh tasting, the literal ice cold killing any nuance the wine originally had. After about an hour, the wine in the bottle had melted enough that only a small iceberg floated in the wine.

Ten percent of the clear, flaky ice floated above a sea of pink, while 90 percent lurked underneath like it was trying to sink a ship in a bottle version of the Titanic. Case solved.