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If the Parmigiani Tonda PF Micro-Rotor wasn't so good-looking, Martin Green would have barely noticed that he was wearing it. That’s how he felt after taking the Tonda PF Micro-Rotor for a test drive for three weeks.
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The lockdowns of the pandemic allowed 78-year-old independent watchmaker and A.H.C.I. co-founder Vincent Calabrese a lot of free time to think out things he had been mulling over for years. Foremost among these, his Calasys system, an escapement without a balance spring. Find out much more in this video.
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Ken Gargett suspects that many wine lovers might be wondering just who John Duval is. However, the chances are very good that most wine lovers have indeed enjoyed wines made by John Duval as he was just the third man to be put in charge of Australia’s most famous wine, Penfolds Grange. Duval is now making sensational wines under his own name.
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The Watches TV presents a follow-up video of Danièla and Philippe Dufour, marking close to a year of the two working together. Philippe expresses his joy at working with his daughter, who is in a perfect position to achieve the high level of work that the master requires for his timepieces and carry on the family name.
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Effervescent red wine in Australia was originally known as "sparkling Burgundy" and is often still affectionately referred to as “Spurgles” in accordance with the country's national need to shorten every name. Ken Gargett confesses that he is a fan and shares a few of his favorites here alongside the history of this fascinating sub-genre.
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You don’t have to be a Ducatisti to appreciate the Bulgari Aluminium Ducati Special Edition chronograph; it's eye-catching red dial is likely to catch everyone's eye. But it does go great with the fast Italian bike as Ian Skellern explains here.
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Once regarded among Burgundy’s top wine producers, Bouchard Père & Fils’s fall from grace was slow, steady, and irresistible. But as Ken Gargett reports, it is now making great wines again.
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The glamour of the red carpet at the Cannes film festival is synonymous with gold and diamonds. And thanks to Chopard – one of the pioneers when it comes to ethical gold – the festival’s Palme d’Or trophy and the brand’s Red Carpet collection are helping to make change in the world by using ethically sourced gold and gemstones.
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Martin Green has a passion for diamond-set watches. For him, these watches add an extra layer of craftsmanship while giving designers new ways of expressing themselves. Some brands do gem-setting extremely well, and Parmigiani with its new Tonda variation is a perfect example.
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Nineteenth-century French horologist Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, a man now famous as the father of modern magic, inspired Cartier to begin dabbling in mystery clocks in 1912. And the famous brand has never stopped as an exhibition showing 19 historical mystery clocks so richly illustrated.
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As a reminder that Ian Skellern is getting old, it seems like it was only yesterday that Urwerk was a brash young startup, however 2022 sees the brand celebrating its 25th anniversary. For him, the one timepiece that encapsulates the most of Urwerk in one watch is the incredible UR-112 Aggregat.
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Let's be honest: nobody needs a high-end mechanical watch. That we want one is based on the different levels of how a particular watch appeals to our emotions. And in the heat of passion, we sometimes tend to forget that, as in any normal industry, companies sometimes cease to exist for a panoply of reasons. What should you consider if you would still like to own a watch made by a now-defunct brand? Martin Green has some answers.
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GaryG was invited to Los Angeles for the opening of Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Rodeo Drive boutique and was a promised “special surprise” that turned out to be a lovely exhibit of heritage pieces drawn from the brand’s vault. Here he shares his experiences of the event and the watches.
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In the wake of the current crypto crash and NFT markets taking a nosedive, and sharing sentiments here at Quill & Pad, Joshua Munchow goes over five very good reasons why NFTs could be a looming crisis for the watch industry. He feels that the watch industry needs to choose its next steps very carefully lest it become both latest victim AND inadvertently a criminal grifter in the NFT space.
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There was a plethora of reasonably priced watches to discover at Watches and Wonders 2022. And here Sabine Zwettler highlights five below $5,000 that caught her eye from Oris, TAG Heuer, Montblanc, Tudor, and Baume & Mercier.
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Château Pontet-Canet is a Fifth Growth in the 1855 Classification, but for the last 15 years has been considered the equivalent of a top Second Growth. Ken Gargett is a big fan of the 2015 vintage.
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Watch Femme aims to promote inclusivity in watches, amplify women’s voices in the watch world, highlight female contributions to it, and help create many more career opportunities for women. Elizabeth Doerr takes a closer look at this new movement and its founders' opinions.
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Some people understand the benefits, limitations, and mechanics of duty-free shopping for a luxury watch at an airport: they know a deal when they see one. For these savvy individuals, shopping at the airport can and does make economic sense – sometimes. In this article Chris Malburg explains watch shopping at airports for the rest of us.
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What do truffles, Harley-Davidson motorcycles, trout, elephant dung, and green ants have in common? These items and countless more have all been used to make specialist craft gins. Sure, gin needs juniper. But after that it is open slather. Indeed, it is hard to think of a plant, herb, root, flower, leaf, and much more than has not been used to make gin. And some of them are just batsh*t crazy!
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NBA basketball great James Harden explains how he got into watches and why he invested in Vanguart and its first watch, the Black Hole Tourbillon.
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Produced at BMW’s Bavarian plants, The 8 x Jeff Koons’s multilayer paint job requires more than 250 hours of painstaking hand-application by a team of 20 – the most time BMW has spent on the exterior paintwork of any automobile. Y-Jean Mun-Delsalle sat down with the famed artist to talk about this colorful collaboration.
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The Quill & Pad team was invited to a private chat at the Four Seasons hotel with Jean-Claude Biver, one of the most influential and important personalities in modern watchmaking. Biver, now 73, is embarking on what is probably a last hurrah: a watch brand under his own name. This video explains it all in his own words.
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A very special new exhibition opens this week at London’s Design Museum: the OAK Collection (“OAK” stands for “one of a kind”). This exhibition comprises unique and ultra-rare museum-quality timepieces that have been amassed by a single collector over the last 40 years, including the largest number of Patek Philippe timepieces once owned by Henry Graves, Jr. But that is not all.
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We are seeing more and more releases of vintage and prestige cuvees from the great champagne producers. Latest cab off the ranks is the 2014 La Grande Année from Bollinger (and the Rosé from the same year). Ken Gargett tackles questions about it including: where does 2014 rank? Is it a justifiable release? If so, what makes it so?
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At Watches and Wonders 2022, Martin Green was impressed with the Chopard L.U.C XPS 1860 Officer, a striking watch with a yellow gold case and a forest-green dial. So he made a little video for Instagram that went viral. Here he explains why.
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“May I have your full attention? This is one of the most important watches ever.” As Sotheby’s auctioneer Benoît Colson opened lot 72 on May 10, 2022, the room seemed to hold its collective breath for a moment. He continued, “The personal Royal Oak of Gérald Genta – you could not dream of a better provenance for a Royal Oak, an Audemars Piguet, or even any wristwatch.” And here's how the world record price for a vintage AP Royal Oak went down from an eyewitness.
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Trilobe's Une Folle Journée expands upward and outward to expose the mechanical ingenuity behind the dial with a three-dimensional display reminiscent of an exploded view of a movement. Joshua Munchow is a fan and explains why here.
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For many in the watch world, the fairly unassuming Hermès Arceau Le Temps Voyageur – with no tourbillon, no chimes, and nothing insanely in your face – became the watch of the fair at Watches and Wonders 2022. In fact, in our post-fair round table it was the “best in show” for at least half of our on-location team. Elizabeth Doerr takes a closer look at this imaginative opus with practical use.
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After obtaining a Delta Dolce Vita Oversized at the conclusion of his Italian period, Martin Green was a very happy man. The pen served him very well, and he was in love with the looks as well as the writing experience. And while Martin wasn't looking for a replacement pen, it happened anyway . . . with some very famous brands. Read the third part of his writing instrument odyssey here.
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The first Black Tot Day was in 1970, the last day on which sailors in the United Kingdom’s Royal Navy were issued their daily rum rations (“tots”). Pusser's has taken the exact recipe used by the Royal Navy when it discontinued the daily ration on July 31, 1970 and used it to make its rums, the only producer in the world to do so. Here, Ken Gargett fills us in on everything tot - he luckily doesn't go "sipping the admiral," though.
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