Remember the Miracle Machine, an upcoming gadget that can turn water (and a couple of other ingredients) into wine in three days? Turns out, it's a hoax.
In a press release, one of the project's "founders," Kevin James, reveals that it was all a publicity stunt, aiming to draw attention to a not-for-profit organization called "Wine to Water," which provides people around the world with access to clean water.
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"In just under two weeks, the Miracle Machine went viral with over 500 million media impressions as more than 200,000 people watched the Miracle Machine video, nearly 600 media outlets around the world covered the story, 6,000 people tweeted about it, and 7,000 people signed up for a potential crowd-funding platform to invest in the faux machine," wrote James.

The reason why the hoax worked so well, besides the elaborate video presentation, was that it's actually quite possible to make wine at home with little more than a bucket, and a few easily purchased ingredients. Furthermore, the essential process of brewing beer is not that different from making wine, and several automated beer-brewing machines, including Zymatic PicoBrew, already exist on the market.
What sounded fishy about the Miracle Machine is the quickness of the process — in normal conditions, 3 days sounds like an awfully short time for the wine to mature. The other suspicious thing was the fact that the project had no working Kickstarter page. To me, it seemed to me a blunder on the founders' part, but it was obviously intentional — since there is no real project here, there's no need for a Kickstarter page.
Still, even if the Miracle Machine is fake, it would not surprise us if someone actually made an automated wine-making machine in the future. The interest is there, now someone needs to figure out how to actually do it.
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