All wine lovers will know the horror of pouring a bottle with elegance and perfect form, only to look down and witness drips of wine dribbling down the neck and falling on to the table/sofa/floor.
The heartbreak. The humiliation. The wine stains on your sweatpants. Dr Perlman first noticed that the dripping was the most extreme when a bottle was full or close to full.
He also observed that streams of wine have a tendency to curl backward over the lip and run down the side of the glass bottle because glass is hydrophilic, which means it attracts water.
To make the drip-free bottle, Dr Perlman worked with engineer Dr Greg Widberg to create a solution.
His solution: Creating a groove around the neck of the body just beneath the top, that wine can’t pass over.
This groove is roughly 2 millimetres wide and 1 millimetre in depth, and prevents the wine from traveling down the neck of the bottle.
For a drop of wine to make it across the groove, it would have to travel up against the force of gravity. So, it’s not possible.
Instead, droplets of wine fall off the top of the bottle and into the glass with the rest of the wine.
WHAT DOES HYDROPHILIC MEAN?
A hydrophile is a molecule or other molecular entity that is attracted to water molecules and tends to be dissolved by water.
In contrast, hydrophobes are not attracted to water and may seem to be repelled by it.
Oil, for example, is a hydrophobic molecule. It doesn't mix with water and instead sits on top of it. By contrast, glass is a hydrophilic material.
This is why streams of wine have a tendency to curl backward over the lip and run down the side of the glass bottle.
Which all sounds very simple. So why anyone of us haven’t been using this groove-related magic for years? Why have we been putting up with endless jeans ruined by wine drip page?
