Designing a drip-free wine bottle
By Canadian Packaging staff
Design & Innovation General BottlingBrandeis University physicist gets his groove on by designing a drip-free glass wine bottle.
Apparently pouring a drip-free glass of wine is an exact science.
If you’ve ever poured wine from a bottle and grimaced as liquid drops “leak” down the sides onto your hands or tablecloth (see image above)—there’s a reason the waiter has a drip cloth wrapped around a bottle neck at a restaurant—fret not, a physicist has come to your rescue.
Biophysicist and inventor Daniel Perlman at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, has designed a wine bottle that provides a perfect pour.
After watching countless slow-motion videos over a three-year period of wine being poured from a glass bottle, he observed hydrophilicity.
Hydrophilicity is, in layman’s terms, the ability to attract water.
When the wine is poured, Perlman observed that the glass itself causes the liquid wine to curl backwards over the bottle’s lip to flow down the outside of the bottle—which leads to the embarrassing wine spillage.
How Perlman got his groove on… Photo from Brandeis University.
Perlman’s solution was to somehow stop the attraction, or at least limit it, and did so by adding a circular groove around the outside of the bottle just below the bottle’s opening.
The groove acts as a stop gap—literally, as the wine droplets are unable to cross the groove, instead retreating back inside the bottle.
Perlman’s groove width did take some fine-tuning, but determined that a groove measuring 2mm wide and 1mm deep provided the optimum solution.
Wine bottle science is just groovy.
Not yet available, Perlman is in talks with bottle manufacturers for his invention.
Image at top of article showing wine being poured into and out of a glass at the same time, purchased via www.fotolia.com.
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