Until recently, the classic Seelbach cocktail – a blend of bourbon, Cointreau, bitters and champagne – came with a lovely backstory, of the kind that bartenders are fond of telling their customers.

In 1917, the story goes, a bartender at the Seelbach hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, was mixing up a champagne cocktail and a Manhattan for a newlywed couple. The bottle of champagne sprayed into the Manhattan – so the bartender kept the adulterated Manhattan to drink for himself.

The combination of champagne and bourbon from the Manhattan struck him as a promising one and, after a few iterations and tweaks, the Seelbach cocktail was born. Lost during the dry years of prohibition, this cocktail was unearthed from an archived menu by the Seelbach hotel’s head bartender, Adam Seger, in 1995 – and has since had a reputation as a pre-prohibition classic that was nearly consigned to oblivion.

It’s a nice story but, as drinks writer Robert Simonson revealed in the New York Times earlier this month, it’s also pure fiction. Seger in fact invented the drink in 1995 and came up with the backstory as a means of giving his newly minted cocktail some gravitas. The cocktail was subsequently written up in Gary and Mardee Haidin Regan’s 1997 book, New Classic Cocktails, from where it – and its fake backstory – became part of the modern cocktail canon.

Simonson got the scoop from Seger himself, who admitted it in passing at a function for his new bar venture and agreed to go on record. “He willingly told everything,” Simonson says. “He seemed to have been carrying it around for some time and feeling the guilt of it – particularly that he had lied to Gary Regan all of these years.”

Simonson believes that this false history is partly responsible for the Seelbach’s success: “People loved the story – it had this romance of a different time of bartending. Adam created this story because he thought it would be catnip for the press; he didn’t know that bartenders would love it, too.”

Seger’s fabrication is in keeping with a long mixological tradition of tall tales, dodgy anecdotes and outlandish claims. According to legend, for instance, the Gimlet came about because of a provision in the 1867 Merchant Shipping Act, which made the British Navy start stocking Rose’s lime juice cordial (not true); and a pirate, Roberto Cofresí y Ramírez de Arellano, whipped up the first-ever batch of Piña Coladas for his thirsty crew in the early 19th century (he didn’t).

The Seelbach is the latest cocktail in a long line of ‘tall tales, dodgy anecdotes and outlandish claims’. Photograph: Boston Globe via Getty Images

But the discovery of the Seelbach’s fabricated history says much about changes in the cocktail industry, which is demanding a new rigour from its journalists and historians. For cocktail historian David Wondrich, the Seelbach discovery offers an opportunity to gauge how far drinks writing, as a discipline, has come since Seger’s invention of the drink in 1995.

“It wouldn’t have seemed at the time that very much was at stake,” Wondrich says. “When I started writing about cocktails [at the start of the year 2000], I had a column at esquire.com where I had to write a drink of the week. And I put in a few forgeries myself, because it was mostly a branch of humour writing – nobody was taking it very seriously.” (Fortunately, he adds, none of his forgeries ever took off like the Seelbach did.) “I stopped doing that a long time since because, as the cocktail movement grew, the interest in its history grew and people began doing actual research, which had never really occurred before.”

Wondrich says it’s only since around the year 2000 that historians had the tools to dig up a drink’s true origins.

“As far as we knew then, all the stories were fake. There were myths and legends about various drinks and people would pass them along but there was never really any way to check them, so they were all more or less on the same footing. Some of them – like the idea that the Manhattan was invented by Winston Churchill’s mother, patently false and easily disproved in two minutes of Googling – flourished because there was no real way to check them and there was no interest.”

For the drinks writer and historian Wayne Curtis, the tipping point occurred around 2006 – about the same time as his book And a Bottle of Rum was released. “One of the things you started to hear in bars around that time was ‘What’s your source on that?’ I don’t think that phrase had ever been uttered in bars or among cocktail writers prior to that – if you had a good story, you told it.”

The internet has played a huge role in prioritising documented history over bar myth, Curtis continues: “We’ve had this explosion in searchable databases online – you can go into Google Books and find Ernest Hemingway’s references to the vieux carré cocktail.” But, as the journalism industry as a whole has found out, this same technology has enabled misinformation to flourish. “The rise of the internet has lead to an echo chamber of bloggers,” Curtis says. “They’ll just – if not cut and paste – at least write about what they find on other blogs.

“It always amazes me, when I’m researching a cocktail – I’ll put the name in Google, and I see the first lines of the first 10 hits that Google brings up, and they’re all the same. They’re all echoing each other but they’re all different blogs. So if something like the Seelbach gets out there, it gets repeated endlessly like a hall of mirrors and there’s nobody really questioning it.”

In many ways the Seelbach’s story – from its fabricated history to its unmasking as a more recent invention – is a microcosm of a much larger problem of the information age. The digitisation of archives, and the access granted by the internet, has made it easier than ever for the average person to do their own research – but at the same time the unfiltered nature of internet publishing means that misinformation can breed with ease.

In the Seelbach’s case, the stakes are low – after all, it’s just a drink, and it’s just as delicious (albeit less romantic) without the bungling bartender backstory. But in these post-truth, post-Trump times, it’s worth taking any chance we can to think about how we know what we know online. Even if it’s just about a cocktail.