Margarita History

Frank Haas, bartender at Eberlin’s, around the corner from the New York Stock Exchange, adds a little soda water and liqueur to a whiskey sour and names it the Whiskey Daisy. It is served in the standard short-drink glass of the day.

American bartenders’ guides start printing recipes for Gin Daisies sweetened with raspberry syrup or, especially, grenadine, rather than orange liqueur, and now served in a tall glass with cracked ice and soda.

E.R. Madden of the Turf Bar, Main St, Tijuana, reaches for the wrong bottle while mixing a Gin Daisy and creates the Tequila Daisy. It catches on. His recipe is a secret, but appears to have been the grenadine-sweetened version of the Daisy, although served in a short glass.
During that same time, the “noted scientists” behind the bar at the Agua Caliente gambling and racing resort in Tijuana come up with a “sacred formula,” as they describe it: a Tequila version of the grenadine-formula Gin Daisy, with an extra splash of crème de cassis. They call it the “Tequila Sunrise.”
In 1930, The Tequila Daisy is also first mentioned in print (it will be 17 years before it appears in a recipe book).

The Café Royal Cocktail Book, by W. J. Tarling, head bartender at that London institution, includes several recipes for tequila drinks, including the Picador: tequila, lime juice and orange liqueur.
The same year, Nelson Saunders, a Los Angeles developer and civic booster, sponsors a campaign to give Los Angeles more of a Southwestern character, including persuading top bars and nightclubs to make tequila drinks.

McHenry’s Tail O’ the Cock restaurant opens on La Cienega St. in Los Angeles, with John Durlesser behind the bar. He invents the Margarita when he is, as Bon Appetit wrote in 1966, “asked to duplicate a drink a lady customer had once tasted in Mexico.” [Others place this event in the late 1940s or early 1950s.]

World War II brings a great deal of tequila into the U.S. to fill the vacuum created by the suspension of whiskey distilling and other wartime shortages.

July 4th - Francisco “Pancho” Morales, head bartender at Tommy’s Bar, Ciudad Juarez, invents the Margarita when he mixes tequila, lime juice and orange liqueur for an American woman and names it after the Spanish word for “daisy,” margarita (as is claimed in 1974).

Santos Cruz, head bartender at the Studio Lounge in Galveston, Texas invents the Margarita for jazz singer Peggy Lee, who wants a tequila drink but not the usual salt-and-lime business; he makes her a tequila Sidecar; her husband, guitarist Dave Barbour, christens the drink.
The same year, Margaret “Margarita” Sames, an American socialite living in Mexico, invents the Margarita at a Christmas party at her house in Acapulco (among the guests is the owner of the Tail O’ the Cock).

The Margarita first makes it into print in the December issue of Esquire Magazine.

The Margarita finally takes off, due in large part to its popularity at the Tail O’ the Cock.

It’s one of the most popular margarita recipes in the world, and Patrón sat down with creator Julio Bermejo to get the firsthand story of how it came to be.

The world toasted to - and voted for - the spicy Rosa Picante Margarita’s bit of heat and a dash of sophistication to help this delicious drink earn its place in margarita history.