Now the imprtant stuff...Alcohol

As I've briefly mentioned before, some alcohol is not vegan or even vegetarian friendly.
OK, this is how it works, in some cases if the product is vegan friendly, it will have a symbol on the label stating so. However there are other cases when the product looks suitable for vegans but in fact, its not.

Some products such as Baileys are clearly not vegan as cream is used as a main ingredient, however some aren't so obvious. Some red wine, for instance is actually coloured with cochineal, a crimson red dye made from the pregnant female cochineal scale insect. Lovely.

Other than relying on the list of ingredients, finding out what conditioning process was used is virtually impossible when looking at a bottle on the shelf in Tesco's.
Many products are 'fined' during production. This is a process where one ingredient is added in order to remove another. Whether the end product actually contains any of the items used in during fining is irrelevant. The fact that they were used at all is what matters to vegans.

Here are a list of things that can be used for fining alcohol;

Examples of finings used in beer, cider, wine, sherry and port include egg albumen, isinglass (from swim bladders of tropical fish like the Chinese sturgeon), potassium caseinate or casein (derived from milk), gelatin (nasty), chitin (from lobster or crab shells) and - saving the best until last - animal blood (eg ox blood). Equally horribly, some imported vodkas are passed through a bone charcoal filter during the conditioning process.

The information here was found at http://moakes.com/vegan-facts.htm