This is usually referred to as 'cold crashing', and is usually done alongside sterile filtration. The cold temperatures just make a majority of the yeast become rather inactive and anything heavier will settle to the bottom.
They then rack the wine off this sediment and run it through a sterile filtration set-up, to remove any more yeast still free-floating.
Just cold crashing, is rather 'iffy' because when the wine warms back up, any yeast left in suspension will just reawaken and start to multiply and feed all over again, restarting fermentation.
The safest way to do this, is to know what you want ahead of time. If you have an idea of how sweet you like it (takes a few seasons to get this dead-on), you can set aside a portion of the must/juice, sulfite it and put it in the refrigerator.. Let the rest of the must ferment to dry, sorbate the batch and then when the time is right, add the sulfited must back to the sorbated wine; the finished product is sulfited+sorbated, with just-under amount of alcohol you intended (because you set the SG and fermented dry, then dilluted with juice), and still contains natural fruit sugars instead of table sugar, etc.
