LA GALANA – Ten years of salon culture
By KATJA GNANN CIGAR JOURNAL • 3/2019
With La Galana, Annette Meisl has not only created a cigar brand, but also a place in the middle of Cologne that functions as a salon. It is inspired by the themes of cigars, joy of life, culture and sensuality. In 2019 the company celebrates its tenth anniversary.
Annette Meisl loves exciting stories. But she likes the combination of exciting stories and good cigars even more. Her job as an event and artist manager led the busy Cologne native to cigars. In the beginning, during their major events, torcedoras, matching the Cuba show, rolled cigars in the foyer. Because Meisl always wants to know exactly how things work, she trained as a scooter herself and turned her event concept inside out. “On January 1, 2009, I woke up with a very clear vision: I wanted to transform my office into a salon and shop. I had probably already started collecting tobacco-related things out of pure intuition and the brand was also registered.”
Since then, she has been selling La Galana cigars at the front of the shop (six Vitolas in total, made in Honduras), as well as cigars mainly from Cuba, some from Honduras and Nicaragua, as well as selected accessories and types of rum.
In the salon behind it, people taste, smoke and teach; Annette Meisl and her women's power team offer rum tastings and cigar seminars. The business functions as a tasting and not as a bar: there is a free drink with the special tasting cigar (EUR 12.00 to 19.00).
One can say without a doubt that real salon culture in the best sense of the word is flourishing again in the all-round artist's 50 m2 premises: there is discussion, there is room for everyone, the woman herself plays a strong role, and in addition to cigars, there is literature and music and art is indispensable.
La Galana: Ten years of salon culture
The interview can be read on Cigarjournal.com
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