I couldn’t resist investigating further an article I came across that mentioned a Florida man in his late eighties who claimed to have invented the piña colada. If he was still alive, he sounded like a perfect story for the first issue of Mixologist: The Journal of the American Cocktail. I had to find him.

Lingo is a wonderful service. So is Google. My unlimited long distance calls to the PR rep at the Sawgrass Marriott in Ponte Verde Beach, FL turned up good news and bad news. Ricardo Gracia had indeed worked there for years, making piña coladas precisely as he’d made them at the Caribe Hilton in San Juan in the 1950s. However, he’d recently retired at age 90. Gracia, the rep told me, was in ill health and was not up for an interview. I tried every trick in the book to get her to put a word through to him, but she was a stonewall. 

What would Sam Spade—or inspector Clouceau—do in a situation like this? Go around it, of course. I called the resort’s food and beverage department. After working there for 35 years, this guy was sure to have a few friends. I fired off a million questions at the guy who answered the phone. He hadn’t known Gracia that well, but he knew who did. Sure enough. Gracia had been more than a mentor to the F&B manager. He’d been like the guy’s second father.

“Would you like to speak to him?” the F&B manager asked me when I finally tracked him down after a couple of weeks.   An hour later I was on the phone with the man who invented the piña colada—the drink I’d just finished proving in Mixologist is the most broadly influential libation in the 199-year history of cocktails.

The conversation lasted nearly three hours. He not only told me about piña colada’s invention but about traveling through Europe and South America introducing it to the world. He’d made it for the British Bartenders Guild and on the BBC. He taught it to Hilton hotel barmen in Caracas. He trained the barmen at New York’s Millennium Hilton. Our talk ended because his wife needed a hand with the horses on their Florida ranch. 

It was a perfect sunset for a sunny tale. But that was only his side of the story. A Google search for the Caribe Hilton and piña coladas turned up another name. The Caribe Hilton claimed it was a bartender named Ramon “Monchito” Marerro, not Gracia who invented the piña colada. Unfortunately, Monchito had passed away years before. But two of his co-workers were still alive. 

Conversations with Hector Torres and Miguel Marquez who worked for Gracia at the Hilton in the ‘50s turned up more details about life behind one of the era’s top tropical bars and about the birth pf the piña colada. Plus, there were some great moments: like when Hector explained that with four blenders and 49 bar staff they sometimes made piña coladas without blending them. 

“You put it all in a shaker and shake the heck out of it.” He said. Then he hesitated. “But if you talk to Gracia, don’t tell him I did that. Okay?”
Then there’s Daivd Ballachow the guy who brought Coco Lopez to the US back in the ‘60s. On his first visit to Puerto Rico, he tried a piña colada and spent the rest of his vacation tracking down Coco López’s creator, ultimately hammering out a deal to become the US distributor.  He forged that deal with Norman Parkhurst whose family purchased from López-Irizarry after packaging it at their canning factory for years. Ballachow gave me Parkhurst’s number.

When I first called Parkhurst’s cellphone, he was in a board meeting. I could hear the ruckus in the background. I explained why I was calling. He gave me his home number. 

That night, after five minutes of awkward conversation, I realized I was talking to the man Bogart would have found at the end of a case. This was the man who put the whole deal together. The guy Sidney Greenstreet played in the Maltese Falcon. Parkhurst and his team put the piña colada on the map.
What else did Parkhurst have to say? It’s all in Mixologist: The Journal of the American Cocktail—alongside Rupert Holmes’ confession that he’d never tried a piña colada when he wrote his famous song, and conclusive proof that the piña colada is the world’s most broadly influential cocktail.