The USB Wine Key, fictional though it may be, seems to be based on the Ig Nobel Prize-winning work of Jacques Benveniste.
Benveniste is the only person who has been awarded two Ig Nobel Prizes, his second, in 1998, was “for his homeopathic discovery that not only does water have memory, but that the information can be
transmitted over telephone lines and the Internet. ” Benveniste’s company, DigioBio, was formed to make this theory into a reality by delivering drugs over telephone lines and over the internet.
(Thanks to investigator Roger Kautz for bringing this to our attention.)