The First Known Tequila Cocktail Wasn't A Margarita (But Similar)
The Mexican spirit tequila is already is one of the trendiest alcoholic drinks in the world, and its popularity is only growing. Tequila is one of the top five most popular spirits in the U.S., and global sales of Jose Cuervo alone spiked more than 20% from 2019 to 2020.
And as the world's most popular cocktail, the margarita is often discussed in the same breath as tequila, its main ingredient. But the margarita — tequila with lime juice and triple sec, at its most basic — is actually not the original tequila cocktail.
Even though today's tequila could have additives that make it misleading, humans have been fermenting sap from the agave plant for millennia. Modern tequila originated in the 1700s and reached the U.S. in the late 1800s. By that point, the term "cocktail" was not a catch-all for mixed drinks, as today, but instead referred to a specific formula of spirit, water, sugar, and bitters.
And aptly, the first tequila cocktail on record, from 1883, was just called a "cocktail" — very likely what we would call a tequila Old Fashioned. As cocktail culture progressed, so did tequila drinks. At a bar in Tijuana around 1925, the Tequila Daisy was invented: tequila, lime juice, and grenadine, not unlike a modern tequila Sunrise. In New York, a drink called the Gay Caballero switched up other ingredients but introduced the orange flavor that persists in the modern margarita — the creative process at work.
So how did the margarita come to define tequila's reputation?
Like many cocktails, the origins of the margarita are murky — and it's not a surprise that its predecessors have largely been lost to history. Plenty of modern bar-menu favorites, from the martini to the mint julep, have descended from old-school drinks in need of a comeback, but the lineages are not always well-documented.
So although the citrus flavors in today's margarita appeared in earlier tequila cocktails, we don't know when — or even where — the margarita was truly invented. A Texas man claimed to have first made the drink in 1942, making it one of many Mexican foods actually from America. But other sources do indeed place the drink's origins in Mexico; one writer claimed to have had the drink in 1953 in Ensenada, and another mentioned drinking a margarita in 1954 in Rosarito Beach.
But even if the specific details of the first margarita are unknown, perhaps linguistic etymology holds some clues as to how earlier tequila cocktails paved the way for the modern favorite. In Spanish, the word "margarita" refers to a daisy flower — remember the lime-forward Tequila Daisy cocktail? Written mentions of that particular drink increased considerably in the 1930s. So even though the margarita isn't the original tequila cocktail, it might've been around longer than we think — just in a different language.