Water-To-Wine Machine Sound Too Good To Be True? It Is

(NPR) - Think a machine that can turn water into wine is too good to be true? Well, it turns out, it is.

About two weeks ago, two wine industry gurus started marketing a home appliance they called "The Miracle Machine." The machine, the spiel went, would use concentrates, flavor packets and "an array of electrical sensors, transducers, heaters and pumps" to make wine quickly and easily in your home.

That was enough to get 7,000 people to sign up for information about The Miracle Machine's Kickstarter campaign. And plenty of news organizations, including and , published stories about the miraculous contraption, priced at $499.

We here at The Salt are always interested in the science behind new food developments and, after consulting an oenologist, we were skeptical of how this "miracle" could be pulled off. Even if The Miracle Machine did work, just how good could its product taste? We took our doubts to a wine expert, Dr. , a professor of oenology at the University of California, Davis, who agreed that the whole thing sounded pretty suspect.

So we pushed and prodded and, guess what? We can now exclusively report the whole thing was a sham. Turns out, the Miracle Machine was a marketing ploy cooked up (or perhaps "fermented" would be a better word?) by , a public relations company, to promote their pro bono client of the year, a water charity called .