 For some reason, wine dripping down the side of the bottle when you pour it has become as accepted an inevitability as death and taxes (both of which some people probably consider preferable to dripping wine). According to Brandeis University, Perlman is currently shopping his invention to wine bottle manufacturers who may adopt the idea.
– It may be a first-world problem—that little drip of wine that slides annoyingly down the neck of a bottle after it's been poured—but to one scientist, it was simply a physics challenge waiting to be overcome. Biophysicist Daniel Perlman at Brandeis University, an inventor with more than 100 patents under his probably well-designed belt, says he's solved the age-old problem by etching a small groove into the bottle itself, per Phys.org. (You can see a demonstration via this video.) To arrive at his solution, Perlman studied slow-mo videos of wine being poured, then calculated precisely how large of an edge would be required to catch the offending drip. The answer: 2mm wide, 1mm deep. Gizmos already are on the market to stop the spills, while sommeliers might use a napkin to deftly wipe the bottle after a pour, but Perlman wanted to simplify things. "I wanted to change the wine bottle itself," thus avoiding the need for an accessory, he says. Bloggers sound intrigued. The drip issue is a "pretty obvious" flaw that has been allowed to linger for as long as wine bottles have been made, complains a post at BGR. Another at Food & Wine notes that an industry-wide fix would likely raise manufacturing costs. "But innovation has swept through the beverage industry before—remember when not all cans were wide-mouths?—so maybe a drip-free future is within our reach." (How does neon-blue wine sound?)