Margarita

The Margarita is what happens when a whole border region works on the same idea for twenty years and nobody writes anything down. Its skeleton is the Daisy, a nineteenth-century American cocktail family built on a spirit, citrus, and orange liqueur; make a Daisy with tequila and you have made a proto-Margarita, whichever name you give it. By the mid-1930s bartenders in Mexican resort towns and along the border were independently riffing on exactly that combination, which is why so many people later remembered inventing it in good faith.

The named claimants make a better story than a fact. Danny Negrete is said to have created the drink at the Hotel Garci Crespo in Puebla in 1936 for his girlfriend Margarita, a tale preserved mostly in his descendants' recollections, with no paperwork from the era to back it. What the documentary record actually supports is humbler and more interesting: the earliest known print mention arrives only in September 1953, in California's Press Democrat, and the drink's real engine was commerce. Vernon Underwood, whose company distributed Jose Cuervo on the West Coast, noticed a Los Angeles restaurant burning through five cases of tequila a week, found bartender Johnny Durlesser making "Margaritas," and built a national marketing campaign around the drink from the mid-1940s onward. Nobody owns the invention; Cuervo's salesmen own the fame.

The specification here is the International Bartenders Association standard, and its three lines hide three real decisions. The tequila must be a 100% agave blanco, because the drink is mostly tequila and a cheaper mixto (a tequila legally allowed to include non-agave sugars) turns it thin and harsh. The lime must be fresh, since bottled juice deadens the top notes the blanco brings. And the salt rim goes on half the glass, a small courtesy that lets the drinker choose each sip. If you prefer your Margarita without the orange liqueur entirely, that variation has its own name and its own page: the Tommy's Margarita, which swaps the triple sec for agave nectar.

For the full attribution investigation, including the claimants this page compresses, see the cocktails chapter; for the spirit itself, start with the tequila entry.