The Luxury Watch Blog

A Great Watch!

We managed to get our hands on the new Bertolucci FASCINO! Here is a watch review

About The Watch

The Bertolucci FASCINO arrived in a beautiful gift box with all the proper tags and papers. Bertolucci seems to be riding into style with the new FASCINO. This watch retails from $5,900 to $6,400! We got it at GoldWatches.com

First Impressions

Once you open the box, the solid 18k gold watch hits your eye with its size and with the boldness of the dial design. You don’t open the box to find an undersized small watch. You get visually smacked, which is a great first impression. When you lift the watch out of its box and feel it’s’ weight, you feel this is a straightforward, solid 18k gold watch.

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A great new style for a great brand of Bertolucci Watches

The Bertolucci brand was founded in Neuchâtel in 1907 by Remo Bertolucci. Born near Pisa he was a qualified engineer in micro-mechanics and as fate would have it, he fell in love with a young Swiss girl who was holidaying with her parents on the Italian Riviera. At her behest, Remo followed her back to Switzerland in 1965.
Remo joined the family business, an important workshop for the assembly of mechanical watches, and became passionate about the profession to the point where he decided, some years later, to form his own company. With an in-depth knowledge of watchmaking and the industry, Remo founded Bertolucci SA and developed his first collection of watches based upon inspirations from his Mediterranean childhood … the pebbles one finds at the seashore.
From there, the everyday influences of the Renaissance and art of Remo Bertolucci’s Tuscany Riviera came into play and his watch creations juxtaposed refinement and sensuality, the movement of the sea with the voluptuous form of Italian woman, sound with smell; in short the fusion of the infinity of the Italian lifestyle with the undisputed expertise of Swiss watchmaking.

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The great debate, which, under pressure from the barons of timekeeping, has just begun regarding a reformed definition of ‘Swiss Made’ leading to stricter requirements, is going to weigh heavily on the industry’s suppliers.

Called, up to now, watchmaking’s ‘annex branches’, similar to the secondary branches of a tree, the sup-pliers currently run the risk of finding themselves as the main trunk of the watch tree. We know that they are being smothered with orders and that they are trying hard to satisfy them all. In addition, they are also the coveted prey in a frantic race towards industrial verticalization by many brands seeking to establish their independence. All of a sudden, the number of ‘bottlenecks’ in the supply chain has grown considerably in an increasingly nervous environment.

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There’s great interest in complications now among women and a growing women-watch-connoisseurs market,” notes Sue Rechner, former president of and now consultant to midprice Victorinox Swiss Army watches. “More and more women are interested in technical properties of watches, in complications and proprietary movements,” agrees Jenny Piaget, spokeswoman for high-end JeanRichard.

More of these are designed specifically for women, such as Milus’s Merea TriRetrograde Seconds, rather than being downsized men’s models. Franck Muller Geneve, for example, created the world’s smallest tourbillon—specifically for women watch connoisseurs. Audemars Piguet’s women’s automatic Millenary Starlit Sky uses its first complications movement created for a woman’s watch (and platform for future women’s watches), “because many women appreciate the subtleties of mechanical watchmaking,” says a company statement.

Other examples include Harry Winston’s platinum Ocean (seconds and days retrogrades); Pierre Kunz’s Tahiti Moon retrograde (minutes, hours), with Tahitian mother-of-pearl dial; and Rado’s Original automatic.

Citizen’s newest light-powered Eco-Drive calibre is for its women’s Riva chronograph. “More women want complications, and these [with full diamonds and mother-of-pearl inlays] are also feminine, making them more appealing to women,” says Stuart Zuckerman, senior vice president of Citizen Watch of America.

Watch movements

A movement in watchmaking is the mechanism that measures the passage of time and displays the current time (and possibly other information including date, month and day). Movements may be entirely mechanical, entirely electronic (potentially with no moving parts), or a blend of the two. Most watches intended mainly for timekeeping today have electronic movements, with mechanical hands on the face of the watch indicating the time.

Purely mechanical watches are still popular, although they are most commonly seen among expensive, collectible watches such as Fortis, Omega, Rolex and TAG Heuer. Their superb craftsmanship accounts for much of the attraction of purely mechanical watches. Compared to electronic movements, mechanical watches keep very poor time, often with errors of seconds per day. They are frequently sensitive to position and temperature, they are costly to produce, they require regular maintenance and adjustment, and they are more prone to failure.

Generally speaking, inexpensive and moderately priced timepieces with electronic movements now provide most users with timekeeping more accurate than the most expensive Rolex. However, in recent times there has been less emphasis on time precision as many people now carry multiple devices that will tell them the time such as mobile phones, PDAs and laptops, so finely crafted mechanical watches have remained popular less as time pieces and more because of their aesthetic value as jewelry.

Tuning fork watches (introduced by Bulova in 1960) use a 360 hertz tuning fork to drive a mechanical watch. Since the fork is used in place of a typical balance wheel, these watches naturally hum instead of tick.

The inventor, Max Hetzel, was born in Basel, Switzerland, and joined the Bulova Watch Company of Bienne, Switzerland, in 1948. Hetzel was the first to use an electronic device, a transistor, in a wristwatch. Thus, he developed the first watch that could be qualified as electronic. However, fork movements are actually more “electrical”, like an old electrical wall clock, than electronic. The sweep second hand moves fluidly like that of an old electrical wall clock.

Such watches were also sold by Swiss watch companies under license of Bulova. In 1974, after leaving Bulova, Hetzel developed a different tuning fork drive for Omega Watches. The watch featured a cal. 1220 micromotor, and a tuning fork frequency of 720 hertz.[3] This development was obsolete compared to the newer electronic quartz watch which had become cheaper to produce and even more accurate.

Tuning fork movements are electromechanical. The task of converting electronically pulsed fork vibration into rotary movement is done via two tiny jeweled fingers, called pawls, one of which is connected to one of the tuning fork’s tines. As the fork vibrates, the pawls precisely ratchet a tiny index wheel. This index wheel has over 300 barely visible teeth and spins more than 38 million times per year. The tiny electric coils that drive the tuning fork have 8000 turns of insulated copper wire with a diameter of 0.015 mm and a length of 90 meters. This amazing feat of engineering was prototyped in the 1950s.

Electronic movements have few or no moving parts. Essentially, all modern electronic movements use the piezoelectric effect in a tiny quartz crystal to provide a stable time base for a mostly electronic movement: the crystal forms a quartz oscillator which resonates at a specific and highly stable frequency, and which can be used to accurately pace a timekeeping mechanism. For this reason, electronic watches are often called quartz watches. Most quartz movements are primarily electronic but are geared to drive mechanical hands on the face of the watch in order to provide a traditional analog display of the time, which is still preferred by most consumers.

The first prototypes of electronic quartz watches were made by the CEH research laboratory in Switzerland in 1962. The first quartz watch to enter production was the Seiko 35 SQ Astron, which appeared in 1969. Modern quartz movements are produced in very large quantities, and even the cheapest wristwatches typically have quartz movements.

The best quartz movements are significantly more accurate than the worst, but the difference is much smaller than that found between mechanical movements and quartz movements. Quartz movements, even in their most inexpensive forms, are an order of magnitude more accurate than purely mechanical movements. Whereas mechanical movements can typically be off by several seconds a day, an inexpensive quartz movement in a child’s wristwatch may still be accurate to within 500 milliseconds per day—ten times better than a mechanical movement.

Quartz mechanisms usually have a resonant frequency of 32768 Hz, chosen for ease of use (being 215). Using a simple 15 stage divide-by-two circuit, this is turned into a 1 pulse per second signal responsible for the watch’s keeping of time.

Some electronic quartz watches are able to synchronize themselves with an external time source. These sources include radio time signals directly driven by atomic clocks, time signals from GPS navigation satellites, the German DCF77 signal in Europe, and others. These watches are free-running most of the time, but periodically align themselves with the chosen external time source automatically, typically once a day.

Because these watches are regulated by an external time source of extraordinarily high accuracy, they are never off by more than a small fraction of a second a day (depending on the quality of their quartz movements), as long as they can receive the external time signals that they expect. Additionally, their long-term accuracy is comparable to that of the external time signals they receive, which in most cases (such as GPS signals and special radio transmissions of time based on atomic clocks) is better than one second in three million years. For all practical purposes, then, radio-controlled wristwatches keep near perfect time.

Movements of this type synchronize not only the time of day but also the date, the leap-year status of the current year, and the current state of daylight saving time (on or off). They obtain all of this information from the external signals that they receive. Because of this continual automatic updating, they never require manual setting or resetting.

A disadvantage of radio-controlled movements is that they cannot synchronize if radio reception conditions are poor. Even in this case, however, they will simply run autonomously with the same accuracy as a normal quartz watch until they are next able to synchronize.

Recently on Horomundi There has been discussion on if people should wear Luxury Watches outside there homes…

Some people Say:

“I know myself with my small collection that I feign to think of scratching or nicking any one of them so I baby them as best I can.

Some of the higher ticket AP’s make me cringe to think of bringing them anywhere where they could get damaged.. like the corner of a filing cabinet for instance.. or the stucco siding on a house.. a railing on a balcony..

How do you guys / gals tolerate getting scratches and nicks on your watches? How do you even bring some of the 15k ones out of the house?

is this a legitimate worry? or am I just suffering from some phobia? “

While Others Say:

You mean there people who only wear their watches at home and never take them outside ? That’s be like buying a nice car and never driving it and leaving it in the garage.

Not me!

I wear mine as much as possible. At work, at play and in the gym. The only time I don’t wear them is when I’m doing DIY at home or riding my bike. ”

You decide!

A young man, Remo Bertolucci, coming from the region of Pisa and qualified engineer in micro-mechanics, grows up in maritime Tuscan. Mediterranean influences naturally surfaced and sharpened his creativity. A young Swiss woman spends her holidays on the Italian Riviera with her parents. They meet, the thunderbolt is immediate. In 1965, she convinces the young Remo to follow her to Switzerland. The couple will decide to join the family watch business founded since 1911 and located in region of Bienne. It is at this period a very famous workshop in the assembly of mechanical watches. Consequently, Remo becomes passionate by the watch-making world.

Its inventiveness will not be long to exacerbate him. Since 1973, he develops an activity in Private Label. Several years of experiences, of projects of completes watches developments, will make the Italian lifestyle and the Swiss watch-making meet and will give birth to a brand.
In 1987, Remo decides to create his own company; the House BERTOLUCCI S.A. is founded in Neuchâtel.

Remo draws inspiration from the pebbled beaches of his childhood to design his first creations, the Pulchra collection, followed by the Vir in 1994 featuring a bracelet evoking these organic shapes. BERTOLUCCI enters the world of high-end luxury watches and surfs the wave of success. Unfortunately, the brand creator has a terrible accident in 1999 that forced him out and then forced the family to sell the company. It lost ground for several years and is rescued in late 2005 by the Dickson Group. With considerable experience in the field, the Group gives Bertolucci the means to create, develop and establish itself back in the luxury world of watches.