The wine-making Miracle Machine touted as one that could turn water into wine is a hoax as the project's founders reveal it was used to attract the audience towards a greater good.
The widely talked-about wine making Miracle Machine, has no magical powers to turn water in to wine it was a front to attract people to a different cause. According to one of the project founders, the Miracle Machine was a publicity stunt to draw people's attention towards a non-profit organization called "Wine to Water," which aims at providing clean water to the people in need around the world.
As it turns out, everything went just as planned. The idea of making your own wine over the week and enjoying it over the weekend with just a few ingredients including water sounded pretty awesome at the time. The project went viral with a legitimate web page and a promised Kickstarter launch. Hands down, most of us fell for it.
The product teaser was perfectly executed with a fully functional prototype, or at least it appeared to be. Other aspects were taken care of right from setting up a dedicated website to the scientific details explaining the use of "digital refractometers" and "ultrasonic agitators", not to mention the founders were actual winemakers by profession. But why choose such a long route to get people's attention towards a campaign? The answer to that lies in statistics as one of the company's founders notes below.
"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," Kevin James, one of the founders of the project wrote, according to Mashable.
The initial project was built mainly with an aim to provide fine wine to consumers and the revised campaign continues to do the same, but without the wine-making Miracle Machine. Interested participants can buy a bottle of wine from Wine To Water and help save a life. Buyers can choose from a wide range of wine, starting from $16 and going up to $93. By purchasing a $93 MM Red Wine Package, which comes with three 2012 Cabernet Sauvignon bottles, buyers help save 30 lives by offering fresh drinking water for the people in need.
"For the cost of a bottle of fine wine, we provide a way to produce 99.9% pure drinking water to a family for up to five years and THAT is the true miracle," says Doc Hendley, the founder of Wine to Water.