Wine lovers, rejoice! Thanks to inventor Daniel Perlamn, a biophysicist at Brandeis University who’s also a wine enthusiast, a world with drip-free wine bottles could be within our grasp.
When you pour a glass of wine from a bottle, it seems inevitable that one drop will make its way down the side of the bottle. It’s OK when it’s white wine, and not such a big issue when dealing with rosé, but it can make a mess when you’re enjoying a bottle of red.
“Having been a wine drinker for 50 years, I just got tired of the constant stains,” Perlman told HuffPost. And so the quest for a solution began. He cut a circular groove ― 2 millimeters wide and 1 millimeter deep― just below the lip of the bottle and just like that, he stopped the drip. Look:
The same basic wine bottle design has been used for years without change, and with one simple groove Perlman has drastically improved it. It took Perlman about three years and many iterations to come up with this design.
To arrive at this solution, Perlman watched slow motion videos of wine pouring. He noticed that wine tends to curl backward over the lip ― because wine bottles are made of glass, which attract liquid ― and run down the side. The addition of the small groove stops wine in its tracks. In fact, Perlman told HuffPost that the final groove was discovered by accident. The groove was diamond-cut into the bottle to make a place for a Teflon band. Teflon is very good at repelling liquid.
But since wine manufacturers don’t like to add an outside element to the bottles, they decided not to implement the band. They gave the bottle a pour without the band and found that it was effective in stopping the drip. The drip can’t easily cross the notch, and so instead it follows gravity and drops immediately into the glass ― right where it belongs.
Perlman is currently talking to bottle manufacturers about adopting his design, but there’s no word yet on when or if we will see his upgraded bottle in a wine store near you. In the meantime, mind your drips.
