For something that has just one job, you have to admit that there is a fairly fundamental design flaw in wine bottles.
Namely that they are not capable of delivering the precious cargo from bottle to glass without a pathetic little post-pour dribble going all over the place.
While many have tried to come up with a solution to the greatest problem of our times (we’re sticking with just putting a straw in the bottle), most of the devices on the market require wedging a contraction in the bottleneck.
And ain’t nobody got time for that.
Now a biophysicist has put his brain to the best possible use imaginable and designed a non-drip wine bottle with a specialised lip that catches the drips before they fall to a wasted death.
Taking three years (good things come to those who wait) Daniel Perlman from Brandeis University has intricately studied the science of glass bottles, which cause drips because glass is hydrophilic and attracts water-based liquids.
Perlman’s solution, after much trial and error, was to carve a two millimeter-wide groove just below the lip of the bottle, forcing droplets to return to the bottle rather than down the side.
As yet, there’s no news on whether the product will be adopted by wine makers, but we’re quietly confident that our futures will have decidedly less time washing red wine out of white tablecloths.