Tasting Table published a listicle on August 4 profiling eight tequila cocktails it says have largely vanished from bar menus, built on interviews with a roster of bartenders and drinks writers asked to explain why each drink fell off. AOL redistributed the piece through its wire feed in the days after, which is how a niche cocktail-history story reached a wider audience under the AOL byline.
The cocktails named span roughly four decades of pre-Margarita tequila history: a 1930s dry Matador built on tequila, vermouth and orange curaçao; a 1940 Gay Caballero mixing reposado with Malaga wine, orange curaçao, lemon and maraschino; a 1946 El Diablo of tequila, lime, crème de cassis and ginger; a 1970s pineapple-and-lime Matador popularized by Trader Vic's; and the cassis-and-soda original Tequila Sunrise that predates the three-ingredient version the Rolling Stones made famous in 1972.
The history checks out
Independent research on several of these drinks matches the broad strokes of the Tasting Table account. The earlier, dry Matador traces to the Café Royal Cocktail Book, a 1937 compilation published by the United Kingdom Bartenders' Guild covering interwar London bars, a lineage also documented by Punch and by Difford's Guide. The 1972 pineapple version appears in Victor Bergeron's Trader Vic's Bartender's Guide, though Punch has reported that pineapple-forward tequila drinks circulated earlier through Jose Cuervo promotional booklets dating to 1962. The Gay Caballero has an even more specific paper trail: a cocktail researcher writing for Flaviar located it on a 1941 drinks list from El Chico, a Mexican-themed club, tying the name to the Cesar Romero Cisco Kid film released the year before. The Tequila Sunrise's split origin, an Arizona Biltmore drink from the 1930s reworked at the Trident bar in Sausalito in 1970, is corroborated across Difford's Guide, Wine Enthusiast and Tales of the Cocktail Foundation, all of which credit bartender Bobby Lozoff with serving the three-ingredient version to Mick Jagger in June 1972 and Jose Cuervo with printing the recipe on its bottles the following year.
Why the ingredients, not the tequila, killed these drinks
The reasons offered by Tasting Table's sources point less at tequila itself and more at supporting ingredients that fell out of bar inventories. Malaga wine, the sweet Spanish fortified wine central to the Gay Caballero, is described as too specific for a guest to expect a bar to stock. Crème de cassis, once standard in both the El Diablo and the original Tequila Sunrise, was displaced by cheaper grenadine as the Sunrise scaled into a mass-market drink in the 1970s. The dry Matador's stirred, vermouth-forward structure reads as austere to a market trained on sweeter, juice-driven margaritas and palomas. None of this is a tequila problem. It is a supply chain and bar-training problem, which is also why several of the people interviewed think a revival is plausible: the missing components are largely available again through the current cocktail-ingredient market, even if bartenders have to go looking for them.
What it means for the bottle behind the drink
Every one of these builds calls for a straightforward blanco or reposado, not a flavored or cristalino product, which puts pressure on base-spirit quality since there is little else in the glass to hide behind. The Flaviar write-up on the Gay Caballero specifically recommends Siete Leguas as a reposado substitute for what would have been available in 1941; we have Siete Leguas Blanco at 92 and Siete Leguas Reposado at 91, both Verified Pure in our testing. For the El Diablo and the pineapple Matador, home bartenders online have reached for Espolón Blanco and, in one case, swapped in Casamigos when Espolón wasn't on hand. We score Espolón Blanco at 85 and list it Verified Pure; Casamigos Blanco sits lower on our board at 79 and remains Unverified. We have not scored any bottling marketed specifically around these historical recipes, because none exist as commercial products. This is cocktail-menu history, not a producer campaign, and no house in our database has attached its name to a Gay Caballero or El Diablo relaunch.
What we are watching
Whether any of the eight drinks actually reappear on menus this year rather than staying a media-cycle curiosity. Whether crème de cassis or Malaga wine distributors report any uptick tied to the coverage. Whether bar groups already committed to the El Diablo, such as Sunken Harbor Club in Brooklyn and Dante Seaport in Manhattan, expand the drink's footprint or whether its 2022 momentum has already plateaued. And whether any tequila house treats this kind of cocktail-history content as a marketing opening, since a recipe reissue is a low-cost way to signal heritage without touching production or labeling, the two areas we actually audit.