Mouse Wine Cures What Ails You

But, how do the mice taste?

Nah. I don't think so. Can't be true. Jake trying to start an urban legend. And if you did put mice into wine, they would not ferment. Wine only ferments until the alcohol content kills off the yeast. God, I hope I'm right.

Ack! a fecal pellet at about end-10 seconds. Not that that would be the first do-not-want signal.

There's a German wine called "Happy Cat". I'm starting to wonder about it now...

Bob

do you mean to tell me that "happy cat" wine doesn't contain copious quantities of catnip??

i feel sick now.

this is a hoax. although most major blogs have posted it by now, it is false. ask any korean you can find and i bet they will never have heard of it. the video here is pixelated, indicating the images of the fetal mice may have been added. additionally, many of the blogs that have listed this nonsense have images of the supposed product, but with the labels in chinese.

don't forget to fact-check your stories; other blogs are not reliable, even if they all post the same thing. your blog is typically too good to fill with this bigoted crap.

i expected it was a hoax, but was amused by the video anyway. i suppose the fact that i embedded this video here makes me complicit in promulgating racist ideas, but that was certainly not my intention. i was amused and just wanted to share, but hadn't thought about whether this was real or not.

sorry if i misrepresented this video, or my intentions behind sharing it.

The problem is not with you posting this, per se. I am sure that you, and most of your readers, are capable of the critical thought necessary to evaluate the validity of the information barrage that it the internet.

the problem is with a major media outlet with a less-discerning audience reading an entry like this (of which there are many), not doing their homework (it happens all the time) and running a feature on, say, the today show. suddenly, you have a nation full of people who think koreans are gross and inhumane (inmurine?).

the respect of a wide audience (especially a scientific one, as science could not be less well-understood by the general public) comes with a responsibility to post things like this only when you are totally sure they are real or you have clearly marked them as "funny, but probably not true".

funny, but probably not true

that's a very good idea. i thought that what (and how) i wrote about it would indicate to people that i thought it was funny, but probably not true, but i think your idea of specifically marking the entry as such is much better.

Actually, this is probably a spinoff from a Cracked magazine spread on "screwy foods" that I've seen elsewhere. It wasn't even the nastiest of the items there! And I've heard of pretty bizarre stuff in Chinese "health tonics", mice fetuses would be par for the course.

Ah, Here's the link.

re: David Harmon

Actually, that's the first posting I saw too, but that doesn't make it more verifiable than any other, of which there have been quite a few (Halloween-season obsession with gory stuff, I guess). It also includes the photograph I referenced when I mentioned the "Korean" label that's written in Chinese.

First, baby mice can not "ferment" alcohol any more than humans can. Only yeast and bacteria do this. This is why beer and wine are made using yeast, not body parts.

Second, even if the mice were not used to ferment the wine (as the Cracked post claims), they would disintegrate quickly in alcohol as it is not a sufficient preservative to, well, preserve them. This is why scientists use formaldehyde to preserve things like mice. Believe me, if alcohol worked it would be a lot easier.

Just because some magazine lists it along with other items that actually are real (lutevisk is really, truly nasty and I will never understand why various cultures seem to enjoy eating various states of larvae) doesn't make it real. I have yet to hear one person convincingly corroborate this hoax; conversely, I have asked a few Koreans and Chinese about it, and they have all denied any knowledge of it.

CLARIFICATION:

Sorry, I wrote that biological specimens cannot be preserved in alcohol; I actually meant they could not be preserved in alcohol with a proof similar to rice wine (5-20% I think). In order to preserve anything in alcohol (which has not been the scientific standard for a long time, but is used in hard alcohols like tequila) you need close to 200-proof, or 100% alcohol.

My bad!

There's nothing (that I could find) about this on Snopes. All(?) the links I did find were somehow related to the Cracked page, or else where postings by people (some of whom clearly speak Korean or Chinese) that they've "never heard of it". (There were a few mentions of a "snake wine", in both China and North(?) Korea.)