The margarita is the second most popular cocktail in the world* and it’s claimed that in the USA alone, an astonishing 185,000 of them are drunk an hour (yes, an HOUR).
There are a barload of different versions and twists on a margarita, but the classic recipe is made with tequila, triple sec (an orange liqueur like Cointreau or Grand Marnier) and fresh lime juice that’s traditionally served in a margarita glass, a variant on the champagne coupe, with a salt rim.
With tequila as its hero ingredient, it makes sense that it’s become such an American favourite – with Mexico just a hop, skip and a jump away to the south – but who was the first to create the recipe?
As you’ll see, the stories swirl and theories are fiercely debated but what’s clear is that the margarita isn’t so much an instant invention as a gradual evolution. The name may only have been used and popularised from the 1950s but the ingredients and flavour combinations were happily mixed and sipped up to 80 years earlier.
The investigative journey starts in the early 1870s with a cocktail known as the Daisy, an old-style drink with suspiciously similar ingredients to the modern margarita.
It’s essentially a ‘sour’ sweetened with a liqueur but has a splash of fizzy water, probably invented in a bar owned by Fred Eberlin, previously of the famous Hoffman House, near the New York Stock Exchange in 1872.
It proved such a popular choice with thirsty socialites that bartenders all over the city started experimenting, often interchanging the spirit base, making it with anything from whiskey, brandy, gin or rum. But once established, the Daisy blazed a trail around the cocktail-guzzling world, becoming so famous it was later listed in the second edition of the iconic Bar-Tender’s Guide by Jerry Thomas in 1876, with the recipe specifically featuring orange liqueur.
But this was all before Prohibition, of course. On 16th January 1918, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution made it illegal to manufacture, transport and sell alcohol in the USA, putting an abrupt end to the effervescent cocktail culture. So, what did the dry-mouthed population do? After panicking for a bit, a lot of them seemed to dash south, crossing the border into Mexico to slake their thirst in one of the 100s of new bars popping up in the border towns of Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez.
(From July 1918 to July 1919, about 14,130 US tourists crossed the Mexican border. Within a year of Prohibition, that number had risen to 418,735 – an increase from about 39 to about 1,147 people per day!).
While most opted for the hard-to-get Scottish whisky, English gin and Cuban rum, some drinkers and bartenders started experimenting with the local tequila for the first time. Although traditionally enjoyed neat, with salt and lime on the side, it wasn’t long before it was featuring heavily in a host of interesting cocktails and inspiring a wave of new drinkers. So it will come as no surprise that the Tequila Daisy was seemingly ‘invented’ in the chaos of the 1920s in Mexico, as recounted much later in an article with the original bartender himself, the first official mention of the Tequila Daisy in print.
In a feature called ‘Graham’s Sightseeing’ in the Moville Mail (the teeny town of Moville in Iowa had a population of just 911 in 1930!), the newspaper’s editor and owner James Graham recounted his visit to Tijuana and Agua Caliente on 23rd July 1936.
“When we parked, the driver told us of places of interest that are now not so interesting as in the days of Prohibition in the States. Then there were 150 bars open, now there are nine. One of these is run by an Irishman named Madden. The driver had told us of his skill at mixing drinks. One of his inventions has given his saloon the name ‘The home of the famous Tequila Daisy’. As a newspaper man seeking information, I entered the joint and told Mr Madden my curiosity was aroused regarding the Daisy. He was not as talkative as his prototype, Mr Dooley, but I imagine he looks like that gentleman, the creature of his imagination of the late Peter Finaly Dunne. After a while he told me the Daisy was not an invention as no skill was employed in its creation, it was a mistake. ‘In mixing a drink I grabbed the wrong bottle, and the customer was so delighted that he called for another and spread the good news far and wide’, said Mr Madden”.
The taciturn Irish bartender he talked to in Tijuana was called Henry Madden (1882-1948), owner of the popular Turf Bar, who’d reached for gin but accidentally found a tequila bottle instead. So, did an Irishman inadvertently make the first margarita (in all but name) and start a cocktail craze that was to sweep the world? To make this claim even more solid, the translation of ‘daisy’ into Mexican Spanish is ‘margarita’. Interesting, huh?
But there are other contenders to margarita immortality, of course. Around the same time, 8,500 miles away in London, a tequila cocktail called the Picador was making waves in high society, appearing in the Café Royal Cocktail Book in 1937. Written and compiled by W.J. ‘Billy’ Tarling, head bartender of the prestigious Café Royal in Piccadilly and founder of The United Kingdom Bartenders’ Guild with Harry Craddock, it was one of only 15 tequila cocktails featured in his illustrated tome.
The recipe featured tequila, lime juice and Cointreau in almost the same ratio used today (2:1:1 in the book). The only thing missing was the salt rim. To add a further bit of intrigue, the preface states that most of the recipes featured were original creations submitted by Guild members – so could the margarita have been invented by an Englishman?
Back in America a couple of years later, a recipe for a cocktail called simply Tequila Sour appeared in a book called The World Famous Cotton Club: 1939 Book of Mixed Drinks. Written by bartender Charlie Connolly, it had exactly the same ingredients as the Picador – except it added a salt rim. Margarita ground zero?
Around the same time, there are suddenly a heck of a lot of people claiming to have given the margarita it’s iconic name. While none of the stories are perfectly watertight, and we must take certain details with a rim of salt, there is probably a kernel of truth in all. Some of the best are:
In 1936, Daniel ‘Danny’ Negrete claims to have created the cocktail when working behind the bar at the Hotel Garci Crespo in Tehuacán, Mexico, naming the drink after his girlfriend Margarita. (However, according to a later interview with Salvador Negrete, Danny’s son, his father created it instead in honour of his sister-in-law at his brother David’s wedding…).
Later, around 1947 or 1948, another ‘Danny’ – this time Carlos ‘Danny’ Herrera – owner of Rancho La Gloria, a small resort hotel on the way to Rosarito Beach outside Tijuana, was said to have created the margarita. It was popular with Hollywood celebrities like Walt Disney, Alice Faye and Phil Harris (the voice of Baloo in The Jungle Book!), who would regularly come and stay, so it was no surprise a gorgeous B-movie actress called Marjorie King visited.
The story goes she couldn’t handle her spirits neat, so Danny invented the sour drink, naming it after her. (When Herrera was asked later in life exactly when he’d first made it, he said it was around October or November of 1947 or 1948, adding: “Three things happen when you get old. You lose your memory, and I can’t recall the other two.”).
There’s another claim in 1948 too, from a 35-year-old Dallas socialite called Margaret Sames, who is said to have invented the drink for her influential friends at a Christmas party at their holiday home in Acapulco, Mexico. In a later interview with the San Antonio newspaper, she says she wanted to make a refreshing drink that could be enjoyed poolside “as a person can only drink so many beers or so many Bloody Marys”. Her early attempts with rum and Cointreau were not well received, “I was pushed into the swimming pool quite a few times because some of those first drinks were so bad”. She eventually got her ingredients right and it simply became known as ‘Margarita’s drink’ until her husband gave her a set of champagne glasses with her name engraved on them, and the cocktail was born.
It's a claim that’s given added credence when you consider the guests she supposedly had at that infamous Christmas party, which included hotelier Conrad Nicholson "Nicky" Hilton (yes, the Hilton hotels heir), Hollywood film stars Lana Turner and John Wayne, and restaurateur Sheldon A. McHenry, founder of Hollywood’s Tail O’ the Cock restaurant in Los Angeles. They spread the word of this new drink back in the USA to great effect.
So much so that in 1955, a local Californian spirit importer and distributor Vern Underwood from Young’s Market Company noticed that Sheldon’s Tail O’ the Cock was shifting more cases of José Cuervo tequila than all of his other accounts put together. Curious, he investigated and found that Johnny Durlesser, the head barman, was making A LOT of margaritas for his customers.
This inspired him to create an advertising campaign to promote the drink, first detailing the margarita recipe, then with a series of sophisticated paintings of sultry women along with the line: Margarita, more than a girl’s name, which undoubtedly boosted the popularity of the brand and the drink.
(The internet insists Jose Cuervo's 'more than a girl's name' campaign was launched in 1945 but I can’t find any reference of it until 1964 – which makes more sense in the timeline and sales figures, which show that the brand’s volumes in the USA leapt from 300,000 litres to 4.24 million in the decade to 1971).
There are many more unprovable and unknowable claims being disputed, but let’s start looking at some hard facts. The first and earliest known reference to the margarita name in print was on 17th September 1953 in a Californian newspaper called The Press Democrat. In an article called ‘Memo from Mike’ by journalist Michael Demarest, he recounts his own recent Mexican holiday:
“Much as we’d have liked to stay around for the big race, we finally girded up our money belt and drove to Ensenada, where the quail, lobster and Santo Tomas white wine are as elegant as ever and only slightly more expensive. Mexican inflation hasn’t affected the price of margaritas, however. Margaritas are concocted of tequila, Cointreau and lemon juice and served in a glass whose rim has been dipped in salt – to guard the consumer against heat prostration, no doubt. They cost 50 cents a throw, meaning you start throwing things on the third drink.”
Just a few months later, in December 1953, the influential Esquire Magazine pushed the margarita in their ‘Painting the Town with Esquire’ column, leading with: “She’s from Mexico, Señores, and her name is the Margarita Cocktail—and she is lovely to look at, exciting and provocative.”
Then boom, suddenly the margarita was everywhere, the most talked about and on-trend drink in the world, a cocktail superstar made famous by its Mexican mystique, classic taste and canny advertising.
Its meteoric rise has remained unchecked ever since. Another first came on 11th May 1971, when a Dallas-born restaurant entrepreneur called Mariano Martinez invented the frozen margarita machine.
Made from a repurposed soft-serve ice cream dispenser, so important is it to drinks culture it now proudly sits in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
The drink’s musical immortalisation happened in 1977, when Jimmy Buffett’s song ‘Margaritaville’ reached No.8 on the Billboard Top 100 chart. Then the ultimate accolade came on 22nd February 2008, when the world started recognising and celebrating the first National Margarita Day.
The margarita cocktail is a phenomenon, now available in practically every bar in the world in a variety of flavours, textures and garnishes. But its journey from cocktail cast member to leading lady has been surprisingly slow and gradual, with a host of would-be inventors and connoisseurs riding on its coattails along the way. While we will probably never know for sure who invented the recipe or christened the name, the margarita has certainly proven to be a lot more than a girl’s name!
*The mojito pipped it to the top spot according to a 2025 Bacardi Trends Report
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