Paloma

By some surveys the Paloma, not the Margarita, is the most-drunk tequila cocktail in Mexico itself. The build is cantina-simple: blanco tequila and fresh lime in a tall glass over ice, topped with grapefruit soda and seasoned with a pinch of salt or an optional half salt rim. Its ubiquity, though, has never been matched by its paperwork. The drink has no documented inventor, and the man most often credited with creating it spent years politely insisting that he had not.

That man was Don Javier Delgado Corona, owner-bartender of La Capilla, a small cantina in the town of Tequila, Jalisco, reputed to be the oldest bar in the area and the most visited tequila cantina in the world. La Capilla pours Palomas as a matter of course, and Don Javier served them for decades, which is probably how the attribution attached itself to him. But when the cocktail writer Jim Meehan interviewed him at the bar, Don Javier said directly that he had not invented the drink. The one he did invent, the Batanga, is a different cocktail with a much cleaner paper trail.

What the record does support is a timeline built on the drink's key ingredient. Squirt, the American grapefruit soda invented in Phoenix in 1938, began advertising itself as a tequila mixer in the United States in 1950 and reached Mexico in 1955; Jarritos added its toronja (grapefruit) flavor later. A Paloma made with grapefruit soda therefore cannot have existed in Mexico much before the mid-1950s. Earlier grapefruit-and-tequila drinks used fresh juice, and the looser changuirongo family (tequila lengthened with whatever soda was on hand) dates from the 1940s, but the canonical recipe, salt and lime included, accumulated through the late 1950s and 1960s as a folk creation with no single author. Even the name, "dove" in Spanish, resists proof: it may honor Sebastián Yradier's much-recorded song "La Paloma," or simply describe the drink's light, winged character next to the heavier Margarita.

The honest answer on the Paloma's origin is that nobody knows, and the drink loses nothing for it. Its absence from the International Bartenders Association's official list is often called anomalous for something so widely drunk; the structural reason is that the list favors drinks with documented inventors and stable recipes, and the Paloma is a folk standard with a soda-or-fresh-juice question built into its identity. For the full attribution investigation, see the cocktails chapter; for the spirit in the glass, start with the tequila entry.