Some complications just deserve to go together, don’t they? Calendars with moonphases, GMT indications with date windows, alarms with, er… Anyway, chronographs sometimes get partnered with tourbillons, and that’s where watchmaking gets really interesting, as both complications are difficult to engineer. IWC combined the two complications on its Portugieser Tourbillon Rétrograde Chronograph watch, but it’s also gone a step further with its design, as we’ll now see.
I applaud any brand that doesn’t follow the standard 3-6-9 chronograph layout, or any of the subsequent versions which stack the subdials vertically. IWC’s design compounds the information displayed by the chronograph into one subdial by stacking the hours and minutes. This leaves plenty of space on the obsidian-coloured dial for the other stuff, this being the retrograde date indicator offset to the left of the dial’s centre and the one-minute flying tourbillon.
It’s somewhat easy to forget that IWC makes a wide range of watches with many different layouts and complications. Despite being compared to Rolex and Omega by potential customers, IWC’s diverse model lines offer significantly more options than those of the other brands. They are less bound by their historical conventions, perhaps that’s because they don’t have world-dominating mega-successes like the Speedmaster or the Submariner. Perhaps they’re just more daring.
The Portugieser Tourbillon Rétrograde Chronograph watch is quite sizeable, with its case measuring 43.5mm x 15.9mm. Large cases are something IWC are well-known for doing. Their watches tend to be big, but they’re by no means clumsy to wear. However, if you sometimes err on the clumsy side when wearing a watch (like me), you’ll be pleased to know that the case is made of IWC’s proprietary Armor Gold, which they say is more resistant to marring and scratching than regular gold, which is notoriously soft. The case is 30m water resistant.
Inside the Armor Gold case sits the self-winding calibre 89900, which is made up of 375 individual pieces. The rose-gold colour of the movement makes the silvery components of parts such as the flyback chronograph stand out. The movement runs for 68 hours, most likely excluding chronograph usage, and beats at 4Hz.
IWC’s new Portugieser Tourbillon Rétrograde Chronograph ref 394009 joins the other variants of this design but stands out compared to them with that obsidian black dial contrasting the Armor Gold case. It does so at a cost, though, as one of these’ll set you back $145,000 and is limited to 100 examples worldwide.
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