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¡Viva la Margarita!

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The drink changed the way we ordered. Cocktail-friendly chips and salsa were more likely to be upgraded with accompaniments like chile con queso and guacamole. Easily shared bar snacks like a big pile of nachos or fajita meat with a stack of tortillas replaced individual entrées like combination plates as happy hour stretched into dinner.

The lobster ceviche at Sabor and the tuna tacos at Chuy's are the latest in a long line of snacks designed to sell more margaritas. But the frozen margarita not only changed the way we eat in Texas, it transformed the liquor business.

The explosive growth of the frozen margarita created a sharp spike in the demand for tequila. Between 1975 and 1995, tequila sales in the United States increased more than 1,500 percent. From 1995 to 2005, sales doubled again. In the early 1990s, tequila producers were overwhelmed by the demand. They were running out of agave, the plant that tequila is made from. The potential loss of revenues prompted the regulatory body that supervises tequila production in Mexico to liberalize the rules.

Whereas all tequila was once made with 100 percent agave, now tequila could be distilled from 51 percent agave supplemented with cane sugar. The result was cheap tequila bottled solely for the purpose of making margaritas, says Scheinman.

"The margarita is the No 1. cocktail in America," Scheinman says. "Sixty-five percent of the tequila sold in the United States goes into margaritas." The continuing popularity of the cocktail is having unimaginable repercussions. "The rise of the margarita meant that for the first time the major market for tequila was the U.S., not Mexico."

The United States surpassed Mexico in tequila consumption in 2000, and the market continues to grow, fueled by the nation's insatiable demand for margaritas. In Mexico, where tequila is a macho drink taken neat with a chaser, the American frozen cocktail is beginning to make headway among women. The drink is also gaining ground in Europe as part of the Tex-Mex restaurant phenomenon.

Mariano Martinez never received a patent or trademark for his idea. He doesn't think it would have been possible anyway. "I just started making margaritas in a machine that already existed," he shrugged.

"I go places now and I tell people I invented the frozen margarita, and they say, 'Yeah, right.'"

The "ultimate margarita" at the new Trece restaurant in Dallas is made with Herradura Seleccion Suprema tequila, fresh lime juice, some organic agave nectar and a dash of Red Bull. It sells for $45. And that's a bargain, considering that Herradura Seleccion Suprema sells for around $350 a bottle.

The Trece Mexican Kitchen and Tequila Lounge includes a cocktail bar, a tequila lounge, a patio and a VIP room. The menu includes such Nuevo Tex-Mex appetizers as lobster nachos garnished with jalapeño jelly and a seafood cocktail called a lobster mango margarita. The restaurant is designed to cash in on the emerging ultra-premium tequila trend.

As frozen margarita drinkers have grown up, they've started experimenting with more sophisticated cocktails. Shaker drinks like cosmos and martinis have inspired many margarita lovers to switch from frozen to shaken margaritas. Some consider shaken margaritas, sometimes known as "Mexican martinis," to be better showcases for premium tequilas.

I have tried many premium tequilas in many versions of the shaken margarita over the years. I consider them all a waste of good tequila. Reposados and añejo tequilas are aged in oak casks so they are easy to sip, and their mellow flavor is lost in a glass of lime juice. I would no more make a margarita with a Herradura Añejo than I would make a whiskey sour with 12-year-old Macallan single malt Scotch.

The bold, vegetal flavor of plata (silver) tequila is what you want in a margarita. I drink good tequila straight up, and I make frozen margaritas with inexpensive silver tequilas. At Spec's, the rotgut tequilas start at around $8.50 for 750 milliliters. Sauza is the best of the low end at around $13 a bottle, and it's my usual choice for frozen margaritas.

Cuervo Gold is considered a premium tequila; it sells for $16.83. The premium tequila category has recently expanded to include a line of flavored tequilas also made by Cuervo. Cuervo Citrico, Cuervo Pineapple and Cuervo Oranjo (is that some bad Spanglish, or what?) are available at the same price as Cuervo Gold.

Super-premium tequilas such as Centinela, Herradura, El Tesoro and Chinaco go for between $30 and $60 a bottle. This type of tequila will account for 7.4 percent of the 4.5 million cases of tequila that will be sold in the U.S. in 2006. And sales of super premiums are growing at about 15 percent a year.

Beyond super-premium, there's the new ultra-premiums, which include Don Julio Real Tequila at $312, and Patron Gran Platinum at $203 a bottle. The most expensive tequila Spec's sells is Herradura Seleccion Suprema at $342 for a 750-milliliter bottle.

In August of this year, Brown-Forman, the liquor-marketing giant that owns Jack Daniel's, bought the Herradura tequila distillery for $876 million. At a time when all other categories of hard liquor are either declining or showing flat sales, liquor companies are spending their money on the only category that's showing any growth, according to Scheinman.

The concept behind super-premium and ultra-premium liquor marketing was inspired by the single malt Scotch binge of the early 1990s. Bottles of rare and unusual single malts brought astronomical prices from connoisseurs, especially in Japan.

In an attempt to cash in, American liquor marketers bottled "single cask" bourbons with unique-looking labels. Several of these supposedly artisanal bourbons were bottled at the Jim Beam distillery from the same whiskey that would otherwise have ended up in Jim Beam bottles.

And then there was the super-premium vodka craze. Purer and cleaner vodkas at ever-escalating prices captured the public's imagination for a while. But in a blind taste test of 21 vodkas conducted by Eric Asimov of The New York Times, Smirnoff, the least expensive bottle, beat out all the expensive super-premium vodkas, including Grey Goose.

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