Mexico shipped 407.98 million litres of tequila overseas in 2025, its highest export total in three years, according to figures published by the Consejo Regulador del Tequila, the body that certifies the spirit and audits every distillery entitled to use the name. The figure lands two days before Mexican Independence Day, which falls on Wednesday 16 September, and it goes some way to explaining why the Margarita has quietly become one of the drinks Britain orders most.
The council's data splits the total into 129.37 million litres of standard tequila, which was broadly flat, and 278.62 million litres in the 100 per cent agave category, where almost all of the growth sat. Production across the appellation reached roughly 496 million litres, and agave consumption climbed to 2.19 million tonnes from 1.89 million a year earlier. The exports figure is still short of the 418.91 million litre record set in 2022, so this is a recovery rather than a new peak, and the United Kingdom sits inside the council's list of top ten importing markets.
British demand is arriving through cocktails rather than neat serves. CGA by NIQ values the on-trade cocktail market here at more than £700 million a year, and its Hospitality Market Monitor recorded cocktail bars growing 4.3 per cent in the twelve months to December 2025, one of the very few venue formats to expand while the wider late night sector contracted. The Bacardi Cocktail Trends Report, produced with The Future Laboratory, went further still and forecast that the Margarita would be the single most called for cocktail in bars worldwide during 2026.
The date itself has nothing to do with drinks. Independence Day marks the Grito de Dolores, the call to arms issued by the parish priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla in the town of Dolores, Guanajuato, in the early hours of 16 September 1810. The war that followed ran for eleven years before Spain conceded in 1821, and Mexicans mark the anniversary with the president's re-enactment of the grito from the balcony of the National Palace. The tequila association is largely something export markets have attached to it since.
The Margarita's own history is murkier. Three claims turn up again and again, none of them documented at the time. Carlos Herrera is said to have mixed one at Rancho La Gloria near Tijuana in 1938, Francisco Morales is credited with a version behind a bar in Ciudad Juárez in 1942, and the Dallas socialite Margarita Sames claimed she made the first at a party in Acapulco in 1948, although she did not tell the story publicly until the 1980s. Drinks historians tend to point out that the drink is close enough to the older Daisy and to the Sidecar that it may simply have evolved in several places at once rather than been invented by anybody.
It is also not the only agave serve moving. Several UK operators have tipped the Paloma, tequila lengthened with grapefruit soda and lime, as the drink to watch this year, and it is a longer and lighter build than the Margarita by design. If the trade is right about that, the Margarita may hold the top of the list while the category around it broadens.
"The Margarita has been climbing here for about five years and it has finally passed drinks people assumed would never be caught," said David Baddeley, founder of Boozy. "What surprised us more is that it sells about as well in October as it does in July. It stopped being a holiday drink somewhere along the way, and I think the tequila itself getting better had a lot more to do with that than any marketing did."
The Boozy Margarita is made in Greater Manchester and canned in a fixed 200ml serve, and the full method for building one from scratch is set out in our Margarita recipe. Anyone curious about the Paloma will find it in the Paloma recipe on the same blog. For readers who want to know exactly what is in the glass when they pour at home, our Cocktail ABV Calculator now covers more than 100 recipes and returns the finished strength and the UK units for each one, measure by measure.
Boozy asks readers to drink responsibly and to keep the UK chief medical officers' guidelines in mind. Advice on units, lower risk drinking and drink free days is available at drinkaware.co.uk.
