A researcher-hero at Brandeis University has made a giant leap for oenophiles everywhere: Daniel Perlman, who works on molecular biophysics, says he’s created a wine bottle that doesn’t drip, by adding a simple indention right below the lip. Ten seconds of the bottle in action is all it takes to witness its game-changer status:
If, like most people, you don’t understand how that works, but still wonder why a smart person didn’t think of it before now, that could be because Perlman — an inventor with over 100 patents to his name that run from healthier snack foods to the first miniaturized home radon detector — had to spend three whole years studying slow-motion videos of wine being poured to come up with this idea. He realized the problem was that wine bottles are made of glass (a surface that attracts water), so the liquid curls back around the lip when it’s being poured. He cut a narrow notch below the bottle’s lip that a wine stream is unable to “jump” across — it needs a flatter pathway. Instead of cascading down the bottle’s side and staining your tablecloth, it just hits Perlman’s millimeter-deep groove instead and is foiled. Gravity pulls it neatly into the glass with the rest of the wine. He’s reportedly talking with manufacturers right now about incorporating the tweak into bottle designs.
