Wine dripping out of the bottle is a nuisance every wine lover understands. It is the very bane of their existence. You open the bottle try to pour it into your glass, and suddenly a stream of wine runs down the bottle. This wastes wine and ruins your tablecloth, and can be extremely annoying.
This has now changed, however, as Daniel Perlman, inventor and biophysics professor at Brandeis University has figured out a way to make a wine bottle drip free. After studying how liquid flows across the bottle’s lip, he figured out that the solution to the problem is by simply cutting a grove just below the lip.
Source: Braneis University
While there are already products in the market than prevent wine from spilling all over the place, it usually involves a separate apparatus that you place on the bottle’s neck. “I wanted to change the wine bottle itself,” Perlman says. “I didn’t want there to be the additional cost or inconvenience of buying an accessory.” So putting his knowledge in Physics to work, he was able to create a drip-free wine bottle.
Perlman had observed that a stream of wine tends to curl backwards over the lip and down the side of the bottle because glass is hydrophilic (meaning it attracts water). So using a diamond cutter tool, he cut a circular grove around the neck of the bottle, just beneath the top. For a drop of wine to make it across the grove, it would need to go inside of it, and then go against the force of gravity or have enough momentum to “jump” across the grove itself. After several tests, Perlman has found that a width of 2 millimeters and a depth of 1 millimeter is the perfect measurement for the grove so that the wine can’t possibly stream past it.
Perlman is currently discussing with bottle manufacturers about the possibility of them adopting his wine bottle design.
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