Several years ago, my wife saw a bottle of pre-mixed margaritas called Stinky Gringo. She asked the store clerk if it was any good. Their response was, “Oh yeah! But don’t plan on going anywhere after you drink it. It’s strong!” We tried it out and liked it. It has about twice the alcohol content of most pre-mixed margaritas. A lot of margaritas that come pre-mixed along with the standard ones you get at Mexican restaurants taste like lime Kool-Aid. But you can taste the tequila in this one. It has become the go-to margarita at the Wheeler house.
This summer, my wife and I spent a week in a state park cabin for vacation. We went to stores around the park to get the food and drink for our stay. One night we were going to eat Mexican food, so we started a search for Stinky Gringo to go with the meal. We went to a variety of stores around the park but couldn’t find the drink we wanted. Each day when we left the park, we would typically have a new list of stores to search. The day of the meal, we had one last store we wanted to try. This store was near a big supermarket so we thought it might have a chance at having what we wanted. But when we walked in, we saw an old Indian couple behind the counter. They gave us suspicious looks as we entered. I found the aisle with the premixed margaritas and saw the familiar Mexican hat character on the label of a bottle. I called to my wife to check it out. While I was happy with my find, not everything looked ok. First, I noticed that the side of the plastic bottle was sucked in. My wife commented that the liquid looked brown instead of the normal green. She asked me if it had an expiration date. I had checked around the cap and top of the bottle but didn’t see one. I turned the bottle over to check for a date on the bottom. I noticed a gray sediment that was stuck to the inside bottom of the bottle. We were not going to buy this one. It was also the only bottle of Stinky Gringo they had in the store. We speculated that this could be the original bottle of Stinky Gringo. This also made us suspicious of anything in that store. We opted to stop at a store that was closer to the park and get a fresh bottle of something we’d had before. It wasn’t as good as Stinky Gringo but it was better that the bottle with the sucked in sides would have ever been.