If you are a connoisseur of fine wines, there’s not a lot you can hate about life! But one thing that annoys any oenophile is the dripping wine when it is poured into a glass, especially when it is full. And despite the fancy wrapping of a napkin around the bottleneck to catch the rogue drops, it is a hassle and eventually, a drip does fall and ruins your clothes.
Daniel Perlman, a prolific biophysicist from Brandies University by profession and a wine lover was tired of this problem as well. So he decided to work on a solution, which took him over three years, but as claimed, has solved this annoying problem for good!
“I wanted to change the wine bottle itself,” he said. “I didn’t want there to be the additional cost or inconvenience of buying an accessory.”
He began the work by studying the physics of pouring wines, and he noticed that it happened when the liquid level was closer to the top. He also noticed that wine drops curl back over the lip due to liquid’s hydrophilic properties, where it attracts water.
To stop this from happening, Perlman and engineer Greg Widberg came up with a seemingly simple but ingenious solution of notching a groove around the neck of the bottle.
The groove is located just below the top, which means a drop that is about to drip off has to overcome the groove, and since it doesn’t have the energy to move against gravity, it instead drops off the lip with the rest of the wine. Perlman’s groove is a carefully designed 2 mm wide and 1 mm deep circle, which presents enough hurdle to any rouge drip from crossing and dripping.
Although the Perlman groove is yet to be taken up by the bottle manufacturers, the elegant simplicity of the solution is surely something to marvel at!