Cinco de Mayo was last week and in honor of the holiday I wanted to know more about the drink which is most associated with it, the Margarita. So I started to go down the wormhole and find out more about the classic cocktail such as who and when it was invented. Come to find out, it was not an easy answer to find. 

There are a myriad of different people who lay claim to inventing the cocktail, but none that can be 100% verified. The drink was thought to have originated from a 1920's-1930's series of sours called Daisy's which comprised of citrus juice, grenadine, and soda water but used gin or whiskey. This would make sense since the word Margarita translates from Spanish to mean daisy in English. It is also thought that when gin and whiskey were hard to get during Prohibition, tequila came in to the picture because it was more easily available to Americans, being that our neighbors were making it. 

One account of the Margarita's origins goes back to 1938 Tijuana, Mexico. A man named Carlos "Danny" Herrera claims to have come up with the drink at a restaurant named Rancho La Gloria. The story goes (and I paraphrase) that Herrera made it for an actress named Marjorie King who could only drink tequila and to make the drink more palatable to her he combined salt, lemon, etc. into drink form known as the Margarita. 

A second account comes from a Texas socialite named Margarita Sames who claims she made the drink for her friends at her vacation home in Acapulco in 1948. Her claim was shown to be false however because the Cuervo company had previously advertised the Margarita in a 1945 publication, 3 years before Ms. Sames claims. At least this is according to a Smithsonian Magazine article written in 2009 by Lisa Bramen.

There are multitudes of others who have claimed to have invented the drink, but the only one that can be verified is the Tommy Margarita (my personal favorite), which was indeed invented by Julio Bermejo at a bar in San Francisco. This variation includes agave syrup in place of orange liqueur. Personally I love the recipe that includes both orange liqueur and agave syrup. 

Whoever stumbled upon this delectable concoction I would love to thank and apparently so would a lot of other people. It is estimated by the Tequila Regulatory Council that Americans consume roughly 185,000 Margaritas per hour on Cinco de Mayo. This calculates to about 4 million Margaritas on that one day! I think it is safe to say the Margarita is here to stay, wherever it came from.