European Watch Co

Laurent Ferrier ships this one with a scale model of the Porsche he raced at Le Mans in 1979. But as Rob points out, that is not the same blue... Although as Justin points out, it doesn’t matter, because Rob is the only watch collector alive who would buy this watch, which makes him the entire market for it.

This watch is named after a 14th century Italian dance. A saltarello (from saltare, “to jump”) is an Italian dance built on a hopping step. Vacheron made 500 of these across three metals, with only 100 in yellow gold. The hour on this piece doesn’t sweep. A spring charges slowly for a full hour while a ratchet holds it back, and on the hour a lever lets go and the whole stored charge fires at once, because turning a disc takes far more force than moving a hand. The minutes do the opposite. They climb a fan-shaped arc and then fly back to zero. This was the first time Vacheron combined a jumping hour and a retrograde minute working together in one wristwatch. The guilloche plays a key role as well. The ribbed fan cut into the dial traces the exact path the minute hand travels across it, and the pattern is lifted off Vacheron jump hour pocket watches from the 1930s. This model was also the end of something. Vacheron spent the back half of the 1990s making three genuinely strange watches, the Mercator, the Heures Sautantes and this one, and then moved on to more traditional designs. The Saltarello was the last of them. Available now.

Justin and Rob on the Vacheron American 1921 Perpetual Calendar. Everyone knows the 1921 as the tilted one. The driver’s watch, dial turned 45 degrees, crown up in the corner. This is the version where Vacheron turned it back. The dial sits upright. The crown moved to the left instead, which is where it was on the 1919 original. And because the crown moved, the whole calendar swung round with it, so the moonphase ends up riding near the top of the dial rather than sitting at 6. The movement is the calibre 1120, built off the Jaeger-LeCoultre 920 from 1967. Same base that goes into a Royal Oak and a Nautilus. With a perpetual calendar stacked on top it’s still only just over 4mm thick. They made 20. Platinum only, sold through four boutiques: Geneva, Moscow, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Justin said he’d be shocked to see another one come through the store. Only one example has ever appeared at public auction, and that was the same watch selling twice.

A. Lange & Söhne has almost never built a watch specifically for a retailer. This is one of the 25 it did. The shop is Dubail, located on Place Vendôme in Paris. The relationship was close enough that Lange engraved the retailer’s name on the caseback, something it does for virtually no one. Two of the 25 have come up at auction, numbered 23 and 24. The whole edition was built in a single batch and then stopped. The dial is blue mother of pearl. The translucency and the grain are different on every disc that gets cut, so no two of the 25 look the same despite all being produced at the same time. Lange doesn’t offer a mother of pearl dial anywhere in the collection today. The Soirée dials belong to the early 2000s, and this blue variant was created for Dubail and nobody else. There’s a smaller sibling. Before this one Lange built a 38.5mm Lange 1 for the same shop, also blue mother of pearl, also 25 pieces. This is the 41mm continuation of that watch. Available now on our website!

Taylor with Kari Voutilainen at WatchTime New York and asked him about his process and where the brand goes from here. Amazing conversation, and we'll continue to have more NYC WatchTime content so make sure you follow to not miss it!

This was the last one. Patek killed the 5140 off one version at a time, and the charcoal platinum 5140P-017 was the final one left standing. The line launched in white gold in 2006. Yellow followed, then rose, and platinum didn’t arrive until 2010, four years into the collection. By 2016 everything else had gone and this charcoal grey sunburst dial with gold markers was the entire line. It didn’t last long after that either. By the middle of 2018 Patek had taken it out of the catalogue and the line passed to the 5327. What it replaced was the 3940, and Patek deliberately changed almost nothing. 37.2mm instead of 36. A convex bezel where the old one had been concave. And of the three subdials only the one at 6 was enlarged, because the date is the part that most people actually read. There’s a quirk on this dial that Patek quietly corrected afterwards. Look at the date ring. The 5 and the 27 are drawn smaller than every other number, so they sit there looking squashed. On the 5327 they’re all the same size. It also comes with a second case back. Solid platinum, fitted by Patek, so the movement can be closed away and the back engraved if that’s what you’re into. Available now on our website.

Rob’s favourite brand is Panerai, and he still couldn’t keep a straight face about this one. The Mare Nostrum comes with a toy boat. Which is funnier once you know what the watch was for. Panerai built the original in 1943 for deck officers in the Royal Italian Navy, and the chronograph was there to time torpedo runs. 52mm of steel and an Angelus movement. The war killed the project before it ever reached production. Depending on the source, somewhere between three and ten prototypes exist, and Panerai had to buy one of its own back at Christie’s in 2005 for 132,000 francs. Eighty years later the reissue turns up with a model ship in the box. Mare Nostrum means “our sea.” They committed to the theme.

Philippe Dufour is a legend that has spent his life building some of the finest watches ever made by hand. This is the first new watch he ever bought for himself. Watch the minute counter on a Datograph. It doesn’t creep forward. It snaps, exactly as the seconds hand crosses 12, and Lange patented the mechanism that does it in 1998. On the movement, Dufour said this: “The perfect finishing of all the elements jumped out at me, just like a 3D effect.” And then, “in my humble opinion, this watch is a pure masterpiece.” It’s the calibre L951.1, 405 parts, 40 jewels, four of them sitting in screwed gold chatons, with a column wheel and a balance cock engraved by hand. Rose gold with a black dial is the version collectors attached his name to. Lange built it for about two years, from 2003 to 2005, and that was the whole run. The gold bracelet is by Wellendorff, the German jeweller who was Lange’s only bracelet supplier. Coming to our website soon...

EP 18 of ranking EVERY watch brand... Cartier, which happens to be Justin’s favourite brand, so this one was never going to be calm. They both agree, Cartier has no middle ground. When they’re good they’re making shapes nobody else on earth would attempt, the Crash, the Pebble, the Tank Asymétrique. But when they miss... they really miss. Justin’s argument is that the hits are so far ahead of everyone else that the misses stop counting. He wants S tier. Rob says A tier. It's worth remembering where that puts them. AP and... Panerai are the only brands in S so far, and Patek, Vacheron and Rolex are all sitting at A. So the question isn’t whether Cartier is great. It’s whether Cartier belongs above Patek.

Every 8 seconds this watch stops drawing power from the mainspring and rewinds a tiny second spring instead. That’s the remontoire, and on the standard version you can watch it working through the dial. On this one you can’t. Grönefeld closed the dial over it, which meant designing a flatter governor and a new bridge so the whole mechanism could sink down into the movement. Hodinkee commissioned it in a run of just 12 pieces, drawn from a total of 188 of these movements. Working out whether the dial could even be closed took Grönefeld over a month of engineering before anyone started building. 8 seconds is a strange interval, because it doesn’t divide into 60. What it gives you is 48 beats of perfectly even force, then a fresh push, 450 times an hour and 10,800 times a day. The bridges are stainless steel rather than the German silver almost everyone else uses. Steel is far harder, so bevelling and polishing it by hand takes much longer, and their shapes come from the bell gable facades on Dutch houses. 1941 is the year Bart and Tim Grönefeld’s father was born. Three generations of the family have made watches in the same Dutch town, and the church tower clock their grandfather looked after there runs on a remontoire too. Coming to our website soon...

Patek just launched six new Gondolos, but every single one of them is a women’s reference… Rob has been waiting years for a men’s Gondolo and took this personally. Three of the six carry a flange of 108 diamonds. The other three are fully set, 687 stones and 3.11 carats across the dial, flange, case and buckle. And all six are quartz...

It’s the same shape and size as an Apple Watch but it’s cased in 18k white gold and you wind it by hand. It’s the Swiss Alp Brrrr. Moser released it alongside a companion called the Zzzz, limited to 20 pieces each and zero vowels between them. The case is 38.2mm by 44mm, with straps attached to wire lugs rather than clipped in the way Apple’s do. That difference is the whole argument the watch is making. The dial is a blue fumé, bright through the middle and darkening as it runs toward the edge. Inside is the HMC 324, made in house by Moser, hand wound, 27 jewels, running at 18,000 beats an hour and holding four full days of reserve. From the front this thing tells you nothing but the time. No text notifications, no health updates, no apps. Get ready for people to be REAL confused by this one! Available now on our website!

Taylor with Laurent Ferrier on the new Sport Traveller at NYC WatchTime. 42mm cushion case in grade 5 titanium, so it wears far lighter than the size suggests. Dual time, with two pushers on the left that move the local hour hand without ever stopping the movement. And the micro rotor is 950 platinum, set off centre so you can still see the calibre working around it. She told Taylor the whole thing comes out of motor racing, which Mr Ferrier has loved his whole life. Stay tuned for more content from NYC WatchTime!

The whole month sits on the dial. A fixed ring of dates with a gold crescent sliding around to mark today, and the weekends picked out in a different colour so the week reads at a glance. Count the positions though. There are 35, not 31. The last four preview the opening days of next month, so you’re always looking at five full weeks. That’s what makes it an agenda rather than a date window. Calibre C032, hand wound, 378 parts, 46 jewels, 72 hours. Every month is treated as 31 days, so you correct it five times a year and that’s it. 39mm of white gold, and the white gold version is capped at 45 a year.

There are 80 baguette diamonds on this watch, and 22 of them sit on the clasp where nobody will ever see them. The other 58 run across the bezel and down the lugs, channel set so tightly there’s no metal showing between them. Roughly 4.84 carats altogether, and all of it done by Patek rather than added by someone afterwards. Look closely at 12 o’clock and you’ll notice that the marker is a baguette diamond too. And there’s one more that doesn’t appear in any count, a brilliant cut set into the case at 6, which is how Patek marks a platinum watch without shouting it. Everything underneath the stones is standard 5270. Black lacquer built up in 12 separate layers, sub dials sunk below the surface rather than printed onto it, and a tachymeter running around the edge. The movement is the calibre CH 29-535 PS Q which was the first perpetual calendar chronograph Patek ever built entirely in house. Six of its innovations are patented. It also comes with a second case back. A solid platinum one, so the owner can close the movement away on the days they’d rather not show it. Available now.

That’s a square dial, rotated 45 degrees, sitting inside a perfectly round case. Cartier London built the original in 1972, and research suggests only six of the large size were ever made. One of the originals sold at Phillips a few years ago for 403,200 francs, roughly eight times its estimate. Those originals were built in a Clerkenwell workshop and carried across London by an apprentice on the number 38 bus, in a briefcase with that week’s straps and buckles. The thinking was that nobody would ever suspect a scruffy kid on public transport. This is the reissue Pebble Cartier brought back for the 50th anniversary, limited to 150 individually numbered pieces. Inside is the calibre 430 MC, hand wound and only 2.1mm thick, which is the entire reason the finished watch comes in at 6.3mm. Three things separate it from a 1972 example. The crystal is sapphire rather than plexiglass, it measures 36mm instead of roughly 35.5mm, and Cartier hid its secret signature inside the VII. Available now.

The winding rotor on this watch looks exactly the same from the front as it does from the back. Most micro rotors hang off one side on ball bearings. This one is sandwiched between two bridges, each with its own ruby bearing, and the main plate is cut away in a circle around it so you see the same solid gold weight from either side. The dial is Grand Feu enamel on a white gold base, fired in house between 780 and 840 degrees, then polished until it reads like a mirror. There are two mainspring barrels and they run in series rather than in parallel. That isn’t really about the 80 hours it buys. It’s so the rate holds steady whatever the state of wind. The screw heads carry an S shaped slot. Romain Gauthier cuts them in house, and the shape isn’t decoration. It lets a watchmaker put more torque through the screw during assembly. He called it the Insight because the dial side was laid out to be read as mechanics rather than just as time. In rose gold with this blue enamel dial, it runs to 10 pieces. Available on our website now.

EP 17 of ranking EVERY watch brand... Grönefeld. Rob opened at A tier. His case was the work. Bart and Tim trained at WOSTEP and then at Renaud & Papi building minute repeaters and tourbillons, and all of it shows up in the finishing. The engraving on those steel bridges is as good as anything anybody is making. Justin’s counter was history. Vacheron goes back to 1755. Patek to 1839. The first watch with Grönefeld on the dial came out in 2008. His argument was that A tier is something you earn over a century, not over 18 years, no matter how good the watches are. One thing in Grönefeld’s favour though. The brothers are third generation. Their family has been doing this in Oldenzaal since 1912, and their best known watch is called the 1941 because that’s the year their father was born. The name on the dial is new. The hands aren’t.

This dial isn’t enamel. It’s porcelain, made from clay and fired at 1,400 degrees. There’s a real difference. Grand feu enamel is built up in fired layers of powdered glass on a metal base. This is clay fired solid into porcelain, then given one transparent coat of enamel for the sheen. The Breguet numerals sit in anthracite with the 12 in scarlet red, and the minute track is gold circles with diamond shaped markers at 3, 6, 9 and 12. The movement is the Calibre FBN 229.01, a self winding micro rotor made up of 186 components and 35 jewels, with 72 hours of reserve. The escapement is silicon and runs double direct impulse, which means two escape wheels push the balance twice every oscillation rather than just once. Limited to just ten pieces in total, it’s 41mm of white gold with that porcelain dial doing most of the talking. Coming to our website soon...

Found a very small independent doing interesting work. A brand called Rolex. Keep an eye on these guys. We think they MIGHT be going somewhere.