Many of us, myself included, tend to slip our dogs a table scrap here, a table scrap there: a slab of meat, a piece of cheese, a stalk of broccoli ol’ Fido will spit out on the carpet and make us clean up. While most of our offerings may seem harmless, there is one thing we should never give our dogs: wine. No matter how much our dogs beg, plead, or promise to clean up their own mess in the backyard, wine is one thing that just isn’t for those of the canine kind.

Now, most dogs probably wouldn’t even drink wine if offered it. I can imagine many would simply stick up their noses and go off and lick themselves. But, there are a few dogs out there that will simply consume anything placed near their mouths. My dog, for instance, once ate a Starburst wrapper and begged for another, leaving me to believe if I ever offered him wine, he’d toast me before quickly chugging it down.

But my dog, and yours, simply must live a life never knowing what good wine tastes like (ironically, many dogs think that humans must live a life never knowing what good cat poop tastes like). The reason wine and dogs don’t go together is simple: wine, or anything that contains grapes, is potentially harmful to dogs. Drinking it can cause them to develop kidney failure, an inability to produce urine, and, of course, slurred barking. Some dogs with this kind of reaction can survive but unfortunately, it can also prove fatal.

Science is unsure why wine has this effect on canines, and unsure why some dogs don’t react poorly to consuming wine and others do. It is assumed that the source of blame lies in a mycotoxin, a poison that can be generated when a fungal infection attacks grapevines. This kind of poison can be prevalent in a variety of grapes: those grown in the backyard, and those bought at the market, those of red color and those of green color, those with seeds and those without, those that are dried (such as raisins) and those that are fresh.