New Delhi: A new tequila has entered Delhi’s watering holes. The Indian brand has arrived in a tall diamond-cut bottle with a golden cap and a medallion that features a dragon curled into an infinity loop.
At its official launch at Taj’s Blue Bar on the rainy evening of July 8, the room was packed with influencers and tequila connoisseurs clustered in small groups around the bar, swirling glasses and comparing notes.
“Is it cherry cask?” one person asked. “I can taste peppercorns,” said another.
Before anyone got to the five cocktails on offer, most guests wanted the golden liquid straight. The lineup of concoctions included riffs on classics such as the Paloma (tequila and grapefruit) and the Picante (tequila, chilli and lime), and was curated by Vivaano’s advocacy lead, Angad Singh Gandhi.
Vivaano launched in Delhi-NCR with two expressions, a Blanco (unaged and clear) and a Reposado (oak-aged and amber), and the room seemed to lean more toward the latter.
The Blanco is vibrant, crisp, and agave-forward. There is fresh citrus, white pepper, and mineral notes, making it a perfect foundation for classic tequila cocktails like a Paloma or a Margarita. The Reposado, on the other hand, is layered with notes of cooked agave, vanilla, gentle oak, honey, butterscotch, and a long, elegant finish. It’s a tequila that can be enjoyed neat or over a single large cube of ice.
Anirudh Singhal, founder of Speed X Bars and a self-described tequila-and-soda loyalist, picked the Reposado.
“It has a great mouthfeel to it. It’s dense,” he said, noting that Reposados are typically the harder of the two styles. Brands like Don Julio, 1800, and Patrón tend to nail the easy-drinking Blanco, but the aged expression is often harsher.
“Vivaano Reposado has definitely captured that positioning gap,” he added.
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Real estate to tequila
Behind the bottle is entrepreneur Arjunpreet Singh Sahni, better known until now as the founder of real estate group Solitairian.
Vivaano, he told ThePrint, wasn’t born out of any ambition to break into the alcohol industry. It stemmed from not being able to find the tequila he actually wanted to drink.
“After years of looking for the bottle I wanted to drink, I stopped looking and built it,” he said, adding, with a shrug, that people may not know his name yet, but they should still have Vivaano in their bars.
The tequila itself is made at Casa La Cofradia, a family-run distillery in Jalisco operating since 1889 under Mexico’s NOM 1137 designation. Both expressions are crafted from 100 percent puro de agave, slow-roasted in traditional brick ovens, and double-distilled using methods the distillery has largely left untouched for over a century.
“The Blanco is for the start of a meal. The Reposado is for the end of the meal. We launched them together because we did not want to make you choose,” Gandhi said, placing Vivaano firmly in the “sipping tequila” category rather than the shot-glass crowd.
He describes it as a “clean product,” free of the additives that leave an aftertaste. His own pick is the Reposado too—the oak, he says, lends it a smoother finish.
Rather than relying on a splashy launch, Vivaano is positioning itself around its provenance, production process, and premium packaging.
It’s a wager made harder by where the brand is pricing itself — Blanco for Rs 6,000 and Reposado for Rs 8500, squarely alongside established names like Patrón and Don Julio, a shelf that doesn’t tend to make room for newcomers.
However, Sahni says there is ample room for more brands.
“I don’t think we have enough tequila brands to begin with in India,” he said.
For now, Vivaano is focusing on fine-dining restaurants, cocktail bars and private tastings across Delhi-NCR instead of a wider retail rollout, putting its early reputation in the hands of bartenders.
“Next, we are launching in Bengaluru and Goa, followed by Dubai,” Sahni said. “What happens in Delhi gets trickled down to Bombay. So we’ll wait for that to happen.”
(Edited by Asavari Singh)