De Nada begins with a simple idea, learned early: great hosting isn’t about impressing people. It’s about making them feel welcome.
For our co-founder Danny Neeson, that came from his mother, Natasha Richardson. An icon of grace and generosity, Natasha brought people together effortlessly. Her table was never a performance. It was an open door, and everyone who walked through it felt like the most important person in the room.
She didn’t entertain to impress. She hosted to connect.
“De Nada exists to carry that legacy forward, to honor it, and to share it with others.”
De Nada is Spanish shorthand for “you’re welcome.” It’s more than a translation. It’s a philosophy: a gesture of generosity, an open invitation, and the instinct to make people feel at home.
This is not a celebrity tequila. It is a family story, one about honoring a legacy through the thing Natasha did best: bringing people together. The family story is the heart. The tequila had to earn its place on its own.
It started the way all good things do: around a table. Danny and Adam were roommates at Tulane, in a city that takes hospitality seriously, hosting dinner parties for friends and trading entrepreneurial dreams over whatever was on the stove.
Danny grew up at a table where everyone was welcome, and he has been setting one like it ever since. De Nada carries his mother’s brand of hospitality forward: generous, unfussy, and always expecting one more guest.
Adam is the builder. He took De Nada from an idea to the highlands of Jalisco, found the right family distillery, and has run it from the agave fields to the shelf ever since, with an operator’s stubbornness about doing things properly: additive-free liquid, honest pricing, and the details nobody sees.
Before the awards and the headlines, De Nada was a dorm room idea. The conviction was simple: tequila could be made honestly, with nothing added, back when almost nobody was saying “additive-free” out loud. We got there first, not because it was a trend, but because it was the only tequila we wanted to drink.
The first bottles were filled in the fall of 2020, and by January 2021 we were selling them door to door on the streets of New York. No distributor, no sales team, no map. We self-distributed every case and earned every account in person, one open door at a time.
The distribution deals came later, and they came the right way: after the tequila had already proven itself. Nobody handed us a shelf. We asked for it, poured for it, and earned it.
In 2024, we put De Nada in the world’s first aluminum tequila bottle. Not glass dressed up as innovation, but the real thing: 100% recycled aluminum, 100% recyclable, and impossible to break. Forbes wrote about it. The Spirits Business wrote about it. Mostly, people drank out of it, in places a glass bottle would never have survived.
The aluminum taught us something we’ve kept: a bottle should go where the gathering goes. But a table has rituals of its own. The weight of a bottle in your hand, the sound of a wood stopper, the way good glass holds the light. So we made a bottle for the table, from premium recycled glass, and gave it a place of honor next to the Travel Bottle.
The aluminum is still out there, doing what it does best. When you find one, that’s not old stock. That’s a first edition.
Which brings us to now. Today, De Nada pours from premium recycled glass, finished with a natural wood ball stopper and designed to sit in the middle of the table, not locked in a cabinet. Blanco, Reposado, and an Añejo that spent more than a year earning its place.
The tequila is the same as it ever was: single-estate agave, additive-free, made by the Vivanco family in the highlands of Jalisco. The awards shelf is getting crowded, the guest list keeps growing, and the philosophy hasn’t moved an inch. Make people feel welcome, and pour them something honest.
The dorm room is long gone. The open door never closed.
De Nada is crafted at Feliciano Vivanco y Asociados in Arandas, high in the Los Altos region of Jalisco, where red volcanic soil and 6,600 feet of elevation grow some of the finest Blue Weber agave in Mexico.
Master distillers Sergio Cruz and Cesar Vivanco make our tequila the way their family always has: single-estate agave, patient fermentation, and nothing added. No glycerin, no coloring, no shortcuts. What you taste is the agave.
