Muscle-head Ronnie on MTV's Jersey Shore is the last guy I'd expect to see drinking a girly cocktail, but surprisingly, his pre-partying drink of choice is his "Ron Ron Juice," a fuchsia-colored concoction of watermelon, cherries, cranberry juice and copious amounts of vodka blended with ice, which he always prepares bare-chested. "It gets the night going," he says. "Whenever that stuff [sic] comes out, it's always a filthy night."

Ah yes, Ron Ron Juice does often serve as fuel for one of Ronnie's many bar fights.

"It's the root of all evil," says DJ Pauly D. Plus, there's nothing like a little Ron Ron Juice to provide the energy to "beat up the beat" of house music at da club. "First, we start off by banging the ground, we're banging it as the beat builds 'cause that beat's hittin' us, so we're fightin' back. It's like we beat up that beat," says DJ Pauly D.

Here, a more refined selection of watermelon cocktails to get fists pumping:

Watermelon-Tequila Cocktails (pictured)

Watermelon Sangria

Watermelon Coolers

A good article by Patrick Comiskey about wine gifts in today's LA Times got me thinking about the fact that there are some remarkable deals out there right now, largely thanks to this year's economy. At the high end, I've seen recently that you can pick up a benchmark Napa Valley Cabernet, the 2007 Caymus Special Selection, for just under $100 in a lot of places—still expensive, but down substantially from its stated release price over the past couple of vintages. Comiskey points out that LA's Wine House picked up a broad selection of wines from Napa's Havens Vineyard when it was shuttered earlier this year, and is selling them for half of what they used to cost. That puts the 2006 Havens Bourriquot Red at just under $18, a steal for this wine. On the east coast, NY's Crush Wine Co. was—and may still be—selling biodynamic high priest Nicolas Joly's 2005 Clos de la Coulee de Serrant for $29.95 a bottle (case purchase only), essentially an absurdly low price for this wine. There seem to be similar specials popping up at wine stores around the country; it takes a little web-hunting and some patience, but if you're looking for pricey wine gifts, now's the time to buy.

In one of the stranger studies I've run across recently, UK's Daily Telegraph reports that German researchers have determined that people find wine to taste fruitier and sweeter in rooms lit with red light, as opposed to white or green light (not that many of us spend times in rooms suffused with green light). Moreover, people are apparently willing to pay more for wine in rooms with red or blue light. I'm predicting a big run on red light bulbs in wine country in the near future...

Recently I received some press info in the mail, as I do pretty much every day of the week, but in this unusual instance I found myself much more interested in the paperclip holding the information together than in the information itself. 

How nifty are those? With a little sleuthing (that would be a nice way to describe sending an email to the PR folks who sent me the thing), I discovered that the clips are made by Klammer Design, a German company that specializes in, well, specialized paperclips. The cost seems to be about $750 for 5,000 paperclips, which I'm told is the minimum order. That's definitely more than I've ever spent on paperclips...but it is tempting.

A number of blogs have picked up on a Times of India story that recently ran (and was picked up here by HuffPo) about a Russian scientist who is credited with developing a powdered form of alcohol. Nifty! Fascinating! Sorta scary, too!

Anyway, turns out the source for the Times of India story, near as I can tell, may be this story that ran in Pravda Online, which seems to be some sort of bizarre semi-tabloid mutation of the formerly dour and not exactly reliable Soviet house-organ newspaper. Lenin would not approve. But I do like this quote from the scientist himself, Yevgeny (or Evgeny, depending on your source) Moskalev:

"Unfortunately, spirit can be only retained in capsules made of stearic acid, so powdered vodka tastes like a candle...To be honest, I did not like vodka in pills. It is much better to eat it with a dessert spoon, although you can’t eat more than three or four spoons and the effect is weak. So, vodka is best consumed the old way."

Darn tootin', Yevgeny. I say consume it the old way, too.

Interesting article on Yahoo today (by way of AFP) about Diageo Chateau & Estates's apparent decision to get out of the Bordeaux market and what's likely to happen to Bordeaux prices as a result. Necessary reading, if you drink or collect Bordeaux!

A group of geologists in Oregon have a few skeptical things to say about the notion of "minerality" in wine, the Southern Oregon Mail Tribute reports. They've got a good point or two—that the amount of actual minerals in wine is below the threshold of human taste and smell, for instance—though they're a bit wobbly on what the French term terroir actually means, which is not just the soil, but the totality of the influence of a specific place on a wine's character.

Terroir takes into account human influence, too, according to Rhône winemaker Michel Chapoutier, who stopped by our office for a quick tasting a few days ago. Chapoutier also made a nice distinction between what he sees as the two broad types of wine in the world: taste-driven wines (where the producer assesses what consumers want, finds appropriate grape sources, and markets a wine that satisfies that demand) and wines of terroir (where the nature of a specific vineyard determines the character of the wine, the winemaker intervenes as little as possible in order to preserve that character, and then the owner hopes that people will buy it). 

When angry colonists threw tea into Boston Harbor in 1773, they had no idea that their rebellion would eventually lead to the American Revolutionary War in 1775, or that it would inspire the creation of another kind of beverage in 2009: Absolut Vodka Boston, a limited-edition vodka infused with black tea and elderflower.

Recently, mixologist Jamie Gordon hosted an Absolut Vodka Boston Tea Party at Food & Wine's New York City office. He gave the editorial staff a taste of some fantastic cocktails he created with the spirit, such as the juicy and aromatic Absolut Boston Blackberry.

ABSOLUT BOSTON BLACKBERRY
Makes 1 Drink

4 large blackberries
1 ounce agave nectar
4 ounces Absolut Boston
1 1/2 ounces fresh lemon juice
4 dashes rhubarb bitters
Ice

In a cocktail shaker, muddle 2 of the blackberries with the agave nectar. Add the Absolut Boston, lemon juice, bitters and ice. Shake well and double strain into a chilled large martini glass. Garnish with the remaining 2 blackberries.

So it seems that researchers in Japan have determined the cause of that horrible metallic super-fishy taste that occurs when some red wines are paired with fish. It's iron. Specifically, the amount of ferrous ion present in the wine. You can read all about this discovery here in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Admittedly, you'll have to be willing to plow through sentences like "Metal ions were analyzed by a postcolumn reaction with 4-(2-pyridylazo)resorcinol reagent combined with spectrophotometric detection," and "Total phenolics of wines were estimated according to the Folin-Ciocalteu method expressed as gallic acid equivalents," but what the heck, it's Wednesday afternoon and you're probably bored at work anyway, right?

If you do manage to wade through the article, you'll hit the payoff which is that tannins—long the scapegoat of bad fish-and-red-wine pairings—are entirely innocent. Yes, tannins are the Dreyfus in this whole fishy affair; blame not the tannins, friends. Instead, stick the onus on iron. Of course, there is one small hitch. As Mssrs. Tamura, Taniguchi, Suzuki, Okubo, Takata and Konno put it with appealing delicacy, "In daily life, it is difficult to predict the iron content in a bottled wine without opening it."

And, one might add, without subjecting it to a postcolumn reaction combined with spectrophotometric detection—but then, who doesn't do that sort of thing, these days?

There's a fascinating article in the NY Times today about how the tongue perceives the particular taste of carbonated beverages—a category that includes sparkling wines. Evidently, it isn't the prickliness of the popping bubbles that gives things that 'fizzy' taste, as one might think, but the receptors in the tongue that perceive sour flavors, which, as it turns out, are also tuned to sense carbon dioxide. The article (and the research paper in Science, which it reports on; only available with a subscription) is mainly concerned with soda and whatnot, but Champagne lovers might get a kick out of it as well.