"This brings us to a statement over which multitudes have stumbled: concerning the blood flowing out of the winepress, even unto the horse bridles, for a distance of a thousand and six hundred furlongs. This is a scary scene for those who think this is literal or that there is a literal battle of Armageddon with hundreds of thousands of soldiers, horses, and rivers of blood flowing. Men who persist in teaching that this is a literal scene should stop to consider all the facts involved in what the prophet saw. We have a description of the harvest and vintage of the earth. No man can maintain other than that these are a figurative harvest and vintage of the earth, to be followed by the great spiritual feast of Tabernacles. Even the so-called “literalists” are not literal in this respect, for they don’t view it as a natural harvest or vintage of grain and grapes! We also find the reapers with sickles, gathering the clusters of the vine, whose grapes are fully ripe. No man can maintain that these are literal sickles, literal vines, and literal grapes! The grapes were cast into the winepress of the passion of God. However one interprets the scene, that winepress is not a literal winepress. No sane man can dispute these statements. Neither is the treading a literal treading. And yet in view of all these facts unspiritual men maintain that the balance of the prophecy has to be fulfilled literally, they doggedly persist in alleging, against all reason, that the predictions concerning blood, and horses, and bridles, and the sixteen hundred furlongs, must be fulfilled literally! In their folly they refuse to believe that this scripture is fulfilled unless it can be shown that such an impossible event has actually been seen by man!"
Much more on blood and wine in the link:
"Wine is a biblical symbol of joy, revelation, and life. Wine represents the inner essence of the fruit from which it comes. Grapes are the principle fruit which produces wine, but grapes are not wine themselves. There are grapes that never fulfill their true destiny! Grapes that remain on the vine harden, and after a time they are pulpy and dry. They will keep for months, dry all the time, and will still be nourishing, but the wine is gone, and the raisins excite a thirst for the juice that is not there. Such grapes are better than nothing, but they are not substitutes for wine! Today we know that both grape juice and wine contain healthy, life-giving properties above almost any fruit on earth. The fact is, the only way to preserve the essence of the grapes is to extract it from them in the form of wine!"
"Are you satisfied with grapes? Then you understand not the principle of the winepress! Be sure the grapes will dry up in your storehouse and will never flow out to quicken, nourish, and bless humanity! Wine brings lasting joy and strength and life, not grapes. And surely you can see that it is not possible to have wine unless the grapes are crushed! Oh, may God help all who read these lines to truly understand! Then you will comprehend the vision John gives us, and you will thank God for the winepress, and you will rejoice at the sight of the blood up to the horses’ bridles! Even the finest fruit will not yield its essence without this process. Indeed, the finer the fruit the firmer the skin, and the heavier the pressure must be upon it to burst its surface that the juices may flow!"
"To have wine you must have grapes. The natural man cannot bring forth the life of Christ or the ministry of sonship, because he has no fruit from which they can be produced. The world is filled with all kinds of vegetation and growth, but the harvest of the Lord is wheat and grapes. All the other “good” things represent something other than the Lord’s crop! Religion is the product of the natural man, but religion has no life! Only the new creation man of the spirit has within him the life of God. If you are walking after the fleshly mind you can bring forth no quickening life because you have nothing but thorns and thistles. Crush them and you get thorn juice and thistle milk which never made the heart of any man rejoice! The natural man can observe rituals and ceremonies, obey rules and regulations, and do many good religious works, but he can never be conformed to the image of Christ and he can never reveal out of himself the life of God that sets creation free. Imagine, if you can, should God cast some of these spiritually dead, dried up, thorny, sour old religious people into His winepress — imagine what would flow out! The true life-flow comes only from God’s wine; and this, in turn, is pressed from God’s grapes!"