Montblanc - Reaching for the Horological Summit
WORLDTEMPUS - January 27, 2011
"We want to be as famous for our watches as we are for our writing instruments," Lutz Bethge, CEO of Montblanc, announced as he began the SIHH presentation for the new products of 2011. This was indeed a bold statement from a company that bases its fame on the Meisterstuck and other now-iconic writing instruments.
Of course, the intimate relationship with Villeret - previously Minerva -and its high-grade movements gave Montblanc the right ammunition needed to enter the haute horlogerie segment. This the company did in 2007 when it announced the takeover of Minerva, with whom Montblanc has created the Villeret line: it includes fine and complicated timepieces, often dominated by creative thinking, yet skillfully Swiss and somehow "nouveau traditionelle," so to speak. At the very latest, the new products shown at SIHH 2009, such as the Grand Tourbillon Heures Mysterieuses, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Montblanc had now become very serious about its haute horlogerie.
Fast forward to last week's SIHH 2011, where Montblanc exhaustively celebrated 190 years of the chronograph in honor of Nicolas Rieussec's original "time writer," which utilized ink to mark a timing interval on the dial. Montblanc's Rieussec line celebrates the art of the stopwatch for the wrist -without ink - which Bethge explained makes up 9 out of 10 of the brand's bestselling models year for year. Sealing the serious deal, Montblanc introduced hand-wound Caliber MBR110 in the monopusher Nicolas Rieussec Chronograph Anniversary Edition. Only 190 pieces of this 43 mm red gold beauty outfitted with a screw balance, column wheel, and twin spring barrels for 72 hours of power reserve will be manufactured.
Villeret 1858 New Vintage Pulsographe
Montblanc's Villeret line continued to showcase its stuff with the stunningly retro-cool New Vintage Pulsographe. This 39.5-millimeter monopusher chronograph, offering design and function en vogue in Minerva's 1930s heyday, features a pulsometer scale - a useful function for doctors measuring patients' pulses. Today, of course, it is more fun than anything to measure your own pulse, and when a scale like this is printed on a wonderful grand feu enamel dial it is more eye candy than instrument. It comes in 58 pieces each in a white (27,000 euros) or red gold (35,000 euros) case.
TimeWalker TwinFly Chronograph
Hitting the price segment that Montblanc aficionados have come to love without compromising on the brand's newer attitude, the very contemporary TimeWalker TwinFly Chronograph provides a real alternative to the above-mentioned chronographs. At 8,950 euros for the limited DLC case and 6,000 euros for the unlimited stainless steel version, it is quite surprising to find that this timer is outfitted with Montblanc's brand-new automatic manufacture movement: Caliber LL100. LL, by the way, stands for Le Locle, where Montblanc's first Swiss factory is located.
This flyback chronograph with screw balance and twin spring barrels for 72 hours of power reserve additionally offers Montblanc's contemporary TimeWalker design. It is therefore likely that the limited version was sold out within the first hours of the SIHH, another certain bestseller.
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