We haven’t paid a visit to the Cheap Lane since October 2015, so it’s high time I picked some more bargains.
Last week I went to an early evening concert at the Royal College of Music. The programme was Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and Schubert’s Symphony No 8, better known as his Unfinished Symphony. Any pretensions I have as a musical expert were blown out of the water after the first piece had been played. I thought it was the violin concerto, there were violins, but it didn’t seem to have a soloist. Of course it was the Schubert. One of my guests tried to make me feel better by saying that he sometimes muddled it with Beethoven.
The violin soloist for the Tchaivoksky was Aleksandra Li, an undergraduate at the RCM. She was born in Vladivostok and has played with Russian and Korean orchestras. She made her 1865 instrument squeal – not sure if that’s a good thing. We had a little more than an hour of pleasure and all for £5 a ticket – right up Cheap Lane.
In March LAMDA will have three stages in their Barons Court home. I have just bought tickets for two of their shows: Flare Path and Bury Fair. Full price is £14 but if you are over 60 or live in the borough, reduced to £7; no complaints about that. Opera Holland Park also delivers good value compared to the Royal Opera House or ENO at around £60 a seat.
It’s not so easy to find good value restaurants but Zedel delivers with its set menu.
Not a very wide choice but you can barely buy a sandwich in London for £9.75. So raise a glass of Crémant de Loire to life in the Cheap Lane. It costs £11.95 a bottle but in my opinion is a cut above cheap supermarket champagnes. Here is what the Wine Society says.
Gratien & Meyer – a jewel in the Loire Valley’s Anjou-Saumur region – was founded by Alfred Gratien in 1864, then aged just 23, and in the same year he established the well-respected Champagne house that is his namesake. The ‘Meyer’ refers to Albert Jean Meyer, an enthusiastic wine expert from Alsace with whom Alfred Gratien joined forces ten years later in 1874, the same year of course in which The Society was founded. When Alfred died in 1885, the Meyer family was entrusted with the company and has continued to uphold its excellent traditions.
Every spring, The Society’s Celebration Crémant de Loire is expertly blended by Society buyer Jo Locke. Florence and her team first sample all of the base wines they have and put together a shortlist of what they believe are the best parcels, but it is down to Jo to construct the final blend. Although generally we use different portions of the typical chenin blanc, chardonnay and cabernet franc, we have in recent years used small portions of the region’s other grapes, including pinot noir. The wines then age for a year in Gratien & Meyer’s cellars before reaching our members.