The Pickle Margarita may be our drink of summer, but we’re going to make room for some Fitzgeralds, too.
In a recent article for VinePair, Hannah Staab revisited Drinks International’s Cocktail Report 2025, noting that the list of the 50 bestselling classic cocktails, as determined by polling 100 of the best bars around the world, had a few recent additions. One of those was the Oaxaca Old Fashioned (no. 34 on the list), a variation on a classic that uses tequila and mezcal in lieu of whiskey.
The other cocktail new to the list is the Fitzgerald (no. 44), a gin drink named for the author F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s the creation of cocktail expert Dale DeGroff, who first devised it in the 1990s and included a recipe for it in his 2002 book The Craft of the Cocktail (which has been updated since). In a 2024 recipe for Food & Wine, Prairie Rose detailed the Fitzgerald’s combination of gin, lemon juice, simple syrup and Angostura bitters, and pointed to its similarity to a Gin Gimlet.
DeGroff’s recipe also allows for some interesting variations. In 2023, writer Peter Suderman explored how to turn the Fitzgerald into a Fitzgerald Collins, and hailed the resulting cocktail’s “moody and complex” flavor. As a fan of cocktails who’s been increasingly curious about gin, I’d have to say that both DeGroff’s original recipe and Suderman’s variation on it sound delicious; it’s not hard to see why the Fitzgerald is gaining popularity across the globe.
The Pickle Margarita Is the Drink of Summer
Sweet, sour AND briny? Sign us up!There is a bit of dissonance in the drink’s name, though. It isn’t surprising to see Fitzgerald, whose name summons up images of Jazz Age revelry, providing the name for a drink that could have been sipped on Jay Gatsby’s veranda. However, Fitzgerald himself struggled with alcoholism, a fact that has led contemporary scholars to analyze the extent to which this influenced his work.
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