Freeze Concentration, sometimes mistakenly called Freeze Distillation is a way to increase the ABV of wine or beer to that of a spirit. It's quite capable of increasing to a 50% + by multiple concentrations.

The method is simple.

Fill a 2 litre bottle with some old wine of say 12% and put it into a freezer for about 3 days, leave the lid loose so it can be removed easier.
Remove the bottle, remove the lid and place it upside down in a 1 litre glass jug.

As water freezes at zero C and alcohol freezes at -114 C, the alcohol will start to drip into the jug leaving behind the water in ice form.
You will notice that the ice in the bottle will begin to lose it's colour. Once you have collected approx 1 litre, the ice in the bottle will have gone almost clear as some alcohol will still be present.

In 2 litres of 12% wine there is 1.760 litres of water, so in theory, if you remove 880 ml of water in the form of ice you are left with 1.120 litres of 24% spirit with intense flavour as doing this concentrates flavour as well, it also makes the product clearer by leaving any particles suspended in the ice.

There is no simple way to measure this as it contains other elements such as sugars etc, so a spirit hydrometer cannot be used, and as of yet I cannot find a calculator on the web.

Some may say "What about the Acetone, Methanol and Acetates than are normally removed by distillation, surely they are still there doing the freeze method".
One brewery in Scotland said "We use this method in our very high ABV beers and have full UK approval for our products.The unwanted alcohols are in such small quantities because we do not ferment the wort over 12%. Shop bought wines & beers contain the same unwanted alcohols but you don't hear people complaining about it, also freeze concentration is legal in the UK, so no distilling license was required by us".

Those of us who make or buy Vodka and wish to increase the ABV for special blends can do this the same way, and can measure the finished product with a spirit hydrometer when it's brought back up to 20C.

It can also be done with beer as BrewDog have proved, and with cider to make Applejack.
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Go for it, I just did some old red WOW and it's turned out like a semi sweet port.
I have 31 bottles of Imperial Stout @ 8.4%,  i'm about to make something like Nuclear Penguin but not quite as strong.

I have done this a few times and had a heavy go at it after Wilco's where selling 20 pint apple and pear cider kits cheap £6.00 (still ciders no pun intended) that presumably bombed in  sales for them around Fathers Day, last year.

I got some good alcohol from them, and although I never had a spirit hydro at the time to test, I did feel I had to drink them with mixers.

The risk of methanol being a problem is pretty small with such low alcohol and small batch size.

Funnily enough the pear jacked cider tasted more like calvados than the apple version.

This 'Yank' gave me a routine to follow in which I  successfully produced a palatable 'shot' that fooled my friends that I was MoonShining.

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Freeze Jacking on this scale is pretty safe IMHO.

Ah! reminds me of a ditty learned at school,
                  Alas poor Jim he'll drink no more,
                  For what he thought was H₂O,
                  Was H₂So₄. 
                  

Yup. Just set up a ferment for an applejack. Interesting times. 

Decisions, decisions. Here I am with 5L of a rather nice apple wine wondering if I really want to do strange things with it.  Oh what the hell, I might as well find out, and if I don't like the result, well I won't do it again. So into the freezer it goes. Can anyone tell me how long I should expect to have to leave a 2L frozen bottle to warm up and drip 1L liquor? My life involves an awful lot of to-ing and fro-ing these days so I would like some clue as to how long I could leave it unattended for.

Thanks for that Matt. 1 hour or less is no problem. I'll go for it tomorrow.

One more question. Is it worth saving/pooling the aqueous fractions with view to taking a second cut? I suspect not, but one doesn't want to chuck it out until quite certain.

Sounds good! How did it taste and do you know the abv?The parsnip that I tried had a more concentrated flavour which seemed to balance well with the alcohol. Not sure about aqueous fractions, I'm still a newbie with this

I love your optimism Manny, but I would think  a second 'cut' is impractical.

The attempted leftovers salvage was, as you can imagine, a very solid ice block, but nevertheless it drained about 750 mL before grinding to a halt. The solid ice I thawed and threw down the sink.

The second freeze of the good stuff was very slushy and in no time drained out a litre of extremely good stuff.

I thawed out the remaining slush, combined it with the 750 mL from above and yes, you guessed it, back in the freezer it went. I'll let you know. Probably a waste of time.

The very good stuff I mostly put in a wine bottle to put it out of temptation's way. The remainder I subjected to an heuristic evaluation  and was much impressed.