Brandeis physicist Daniel Perlman modded a wine bottle so wine wouldn’t dribble when it was poured. Why didn’t the wineries figure this out a couple of hundred years ago?
Perlman studied slow-motion videos of wine being poured. He observed first that drippage was most extreme when a bottle was full or close to it. He also saw that a stream of wine tends to curl backward over the lip and run down the side of the glass bottle because glass is hydrophilic, meaning it attracts water.
Using a diamond-studded tool, Perlman, assisted by engineer Greg Widberg, created a circular groove around the neck of the bottle just beneath the top. A droplet of wine that would otherwise run down the side of the bottle encounters the groove, but can’t traverse it. Instead, it immediately falls off the bottle into the glass along with the rest of the wine.