Gin & Tonic

Paloma

The Paloma is Mexico’s most popular cocktail by volume, considerably outselling the Margarita in the country that produces the tequila both are built on. Outside Mexico its profile is lower, partly because the defining grapefruit soda is less universally available than lime and triple sec. The name means dove, and the origin is most often attributed to Don Javier Delgado Corona of La Capilla in the town of Tequila, Jalisco, though the precise date and the accuracy of that attribution are not clearly established anywhere. What is established is that tequila and grapefruit have been a fixture of Mexican drinking long enough to become the country’s default tequila serve, which is a more meaningful endorsement than any bar guide. The salt rim is the element most often omitted by versions that miss what the drink is doing. Salt suppresses bitterness, which makes it a structural decision rather than a flavouring one.

Gin Rickey

The Gin Rickey is gin, fresh lime juice and soda water over ice, and there is no sugar in it of any kind. That absence is the whole drink. It is what separates a Rickey from a Fizz, and it is why the gin matters more here than in almost anything else you can build. It is named after Colonel Joe Rickey, a Missouri lobbyist who drank his bourbon with lime and soda at Shoomaker's on Pennsylvania Avenue in 1880s Washington, consistently enough that the bartenders named the order after him. The gin version came shortly afterwards and overtook the original so completely that a Rickey now means gin unless you say otherwise. Rickey himself, by most accounts, thought the gin version was worse. He was outvoted. With no sweetener and only three ingredients, the freshness of the lime is the most consequential thing in the build. Squeezed to order it is bright and genuinely refreshing. Squeezed an hour earlier it is flat and slightly bitter, and nothing else in the glass can cover for it.

Negroni Sbagliato

In 1972, mid-rush at Bar Basso in Milan, Mirko Stocchetto reached for the gin to build a Negroni and came up holding prosecco. Sbagliato means mistaken, and the mistake was good enough to keep: Campari and sweet vermouth as always, with the sparkle where the juniper used to be. Bar Basso still serves it in comically vast hand-blown goblets, and the drink has never needed a better origin story because the true one is perfect. What the error produced is the missing rung between the Americano and the Negroni: bitter and vermouth-rich like its siblings, but celebratory where the Negroni is contemplative and livelier than the Americano’s soda could ever manage. At a third of the Negroni’s strength it is the rare aperitivo you can order twice and still make dinner. Fifty years on, a viral clip made it briefly the most requested drink on earth, and a generation discovered what Milan had known all along: some of the best drinks in the canon were never designed, only caught on the way down.