Originally Posted by Anthony

1. I love wine ? most people on here (or on my facebook page) know that. But this fact is gross enough to even make me reconsider it! When grapes are harvested by machine for wine making, the machine shakes the grapes off the vine. But this also means that insects, birds and basically anything else in the vine comes off too. Cheap wine makers don?t generally sort the grapes before pressing, so all of that extra stuff goes into the wine. Expensive makers (fortunately?) have sorting tables, and can remove up to 99% of the MOG (material other than grapes). That means that 1% or more of the juice in the wine is probably dead animals. The author of this story has even seen dead mice in the wine press.

2. Speaking of wine, when a vineyard wants to make its wine beautifully clear, they use a process called fining. To do this, certain finings are added to the wine. Typically this is isinglass (collagen from sturgeon?s bladders), gelatin (from animals hooves and bones), clay and ox blood.