Second Opinions: I Guess I Was Wrong About IWC’s Portugieser ‘Eternal Calendar’

Welcome to “GPHG Week,” a themed mini-series where we’re covering four winning watches from this year’s Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève that you otherwise may have previously missed. Today, we have the IWC Portugieser Eternal Calendar, which was awarded the Aiguille d’Or at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève this year for watch of the year according to the GPHG Jury.

This year, IWC achieved something remarkable that only three other brands have accomplished in the modern era. Amid a relaunch of the Portugeiser line with an updated case, the brand announced it had cracked the code on one of the most challenging complications with their secular perpetual calendar, the Eternal Calendar.

We all know that months and years vary in length, adding complication to any calendar. Standard perpetual calendars account for leap years and the length of individual months. This would be fine if a year were 365.25 days (requiring adjustment every 4 years). But in reality, a year is 365.2425 days, meaning years ending in 100, 200, and 300 aren’t leap years, while years divisible evenly by 400 are leap years. That means standard perpetual calendars will require adjustment once every 100 years.

But I was less than glowing in my initial story, which requires some mea culpa, not for my general opinions that led to the criticism, but both for how I put them and for not seeing the bigger picture. During Watches and Wonders, while writing and photographing dozens of releases, I made what I thought was an innocuous critique of the aesthetics of IWC’s Eternal Calendar – maybe I’m just not a Portugieser guy – which I thought could be bolder or eye-catching to make this fantastic technical achievement stand out. But it was hard to judge – the watch was finished just in time for the fair, and with limited pictures and no chance to go hands-on, it was tough to see what IWC had produced. 

I still stand by the thought (though it has grown on me a little). But instead of saying that and moving on, I unintentionally belabored the point in my rush to write a story. And the watch ended up winning the Aiguille d’Or for best watch of the year at the GPHG. So here’s my chance to be more thoughtful and see what the jury saw. And what they saw was truly outstanding.

The Other Brands To Have Done It

Perpetual calendars have been a core part of IWC’s work since the mid-1980s, with the release of the Kurt Klaus-designed Da Vinci Perpetual Calendar in 1985. Aside from Patek Philippe, I associate IWC with calendar watches more closely than any other brand. So, it’s no surprise that Patek was the brand that first cracked the secular perpetual calendar code in the modern era with the Caliber 89.

Patek included a secular QP in a unique pocket watch for American industrialist Seth Atwood in 1972, marking their first achievement in the complication. However, for the brand’s 150th anniversary in 1989, they added a “date of Easter complication” to the total of 33 complications in the Caliber 89 pocket watch (truly one of the most incredible watches I have seen). For good measure, the watch included a minute repeater, a grande and petite sonnerie, split-seconds chronograph, equation of time, sidereal time, sunset and sunrise, seasons, equinoxes and solstices, zodiac, and Easter (accurate for 5.7 million years). It was as incredible as it was massive.

Next came Sven Andersen, himself a veteran of the Grand Complications workshop at Patek Philippe, who started his own brand, Andersen Genève, in 1980. Andersen was actually consulted on the Caliber 89, but soon, he began searching for a more simple approach that could be turned into a wristwatch. In 1996, he released his result – a new era in watchmaking.

In what amounted to a lineage that started with the Caliber 89 and trickled through Andersen, the next to achieve the secular QP was Franck Muller, who spent time in Andersen’s workshop. With the Aeternitas Mega 4 in 2007, he joined the annals of history, not just for the secular calendar but for the fact that he bested Patek Philippe by creating a wristwatch with 36 complications and in a wristwatch format – the most complicated watch in the world at the time.

The biggest surprise entry to these rarified ranks was Furlan Marri’s Secular Perpetual Calendar for Only Watch earlier this year, which was made with the technical design and plan of master movement designer Dominque Renaud and young watchmaker Julien Tixier. This was by far the most shocking to me, not just because of how young the brand was but also because the module for the calendar required only 25 parts. The watch hasn’t made it into general production—the final step to democratizing such a remarkable (and affordable) movement.

That’s where IWC steps in. Commercial product. Wearable, albeit large. And if nothing else, a final step in a legendary legacy that started with a legendary man, Kurt Klaus, to make the ultimate perpetual calendar.

IWC’s Eternal Achievement

What IWC did with the Eternal Calendar is interesting for several reasons. Let’s start with the technical component.

First of all, everything the brand did fit in a similar case size as the normal perpetual calendar, just slightly wider and thicker. Only slightly. At 44.4mm and 15mm thick in a platinum case, there’s some heft on the wrist. And yet, it’s far more wearable than the Franck Mueller (or Patek, for that matter, which is a workout with two hands). But inside is where it counts. For all the celebration of the accuracy, how IWC did it is almost as interesting as the result.

The IWC-manufactured 52460 caliber only needed eight more parts than the Kurt Klaus-designed standard perpetual calendar to go from accurate to hyper-accurate in a way few others have done. Eight parts. In some ways, it seems funny that it hadn’t been done before because of how simple it is, but in reality, it took decades of work with a handful of variants attempted over the years. Peeking through an aperture on the dial at 4 o’clock is the cam and Maltese cross system that enables this achievement, which the team said wouldn’t have been possible a decade ago because of production challenges. It’s easy to forget how much we owe to the tools that make the watches possible.

Patek Philippe had a much more complex system to solve the secular calendar function. With a 12-month cam and Maltese cross-system, they could handle the February problem, then duplicate that for a system for the three centuries that needed to be skipped, with a lever to negate February in those months while still contacting the cam every 400th year. The Franck Muller Aeternitas Mega was similarly complex and convoluted. Furlan Marri’s attempt, however, was a bit more novel and simple. But it’s nowhere near as simple as IWC’s.

The Kurt Klaus-designed caliber base for the Eternal Calendar is rock solid. It’s got around four decades of refinement to back it up and make it the perfect movement to modify. Based on images of patents found online (Swiss patent CH 718 699 A1), we get a clue as to how they did it.

The 48-month cam that governs the normal perpetual calendar cycle remains the same. A reducing Maltese cross connects to the secular calendar cam that rotates every 400 years (which is remarkable in its own right to make something that turns so slowly in a watch that beats 28,800 times per hour). Another pointed part on a spring slides in and out of that secular cam and allows the calendar to remain accurate. Simplicity also means reliability and ease of manufacture. It’s possible we could see a more affordable version of this model in the not-so-distant future.

The moon phase accuracy came thanks to a supercomputer that tested 22 trillion combinations of gear ratios and layouts that arrived at that 45–plus million-year accuracy. IWC had a number of solutions at the end of the day, thanks to the supercomputer, but picked this one, leaving the door open for potentially other innovations or variations on the Eternal Calendar.

There’s also the not-insignificant technical touch of setting the whole thing via the crown. The watch has everything fully synchronized to a date and time, and once you pick it up from the boutique, it won’t require you to know anything about where the moon phase is. As long as you go past the “danger zone” (to 4:00 am, ideally), you can pull the crown out to the first position and move the date forward, synchronized with the day, month, year, and moon phase.

Finally, it’s interesting how IWC threaded the needle on pricing. The last time a Caliber 89 came up at auction, the estimate was CHF 6.5 million to 10 million, though it failed to sell. The Franck Muller Aeternitas Mega 4 cost $2.7 million. But surprisingly, the Svend Andersen examples (there were less than 100 made) have sold for around CHF 15,000 or less in the past, and Furlan Marri set a reasonable estimate at OnlyWatch of CHF 20,000 to 30,000, telegraphing potential prices for a commercial release.

When IWC’s Eternal Calendar was announced at CHF 150,000, I was somewhat shocked. It’s undoubtedly one of the highest prices in recent memory from IWC but far from the most expensive IWC in the last 15 years (for that, you can look to the IWC Sidérale Scafusia from 2012, which ran $750,000). Compared to the standard Portugeiser perpetual calendars – $46,500 in Armor Gold or $47,500 in white gold  – that’s a massive increase. You do, however, get a platinum case, which isn’t anything to scoff at. And heck, it’s a secular perpetual calendar! That’s pretty incredible. Two examples of the Eternal Calendar are listed online at the time of writing, which are $135,000 and $187,000, which makes it feel like people are testing the market to see where they will land, but these certainly aren’t watches you’ll see frequently.

Secondary market price aside, I think it’s better to admire that IWC has created what will be the first widely serially produced secular perpetual calendar in the modern era and at a price that feels relatively appropriate for a commercial product from a big brand. Their factory in Schaffhausen is both massive and state of the art in a way that Andersen Geneve or Furlan Marri couldn’t (or wouldn’t want to) achieve, which will allow them to produce these watches at a higher quantity as the most simple, effective, and commercial luxury secular perpetual calendar that we’ll see for a very long time.

The Critiques

This is where we get into personal preference. IWC’s Eternal Calendar has grown on me slightly over the last few months. In person (and on various wrists, including in the videos of my friend Justin Hast), the floating glass subdials have a certain airy quality. That’s further emphasized by the fact that the dial itself is made of glass, with white lacquer underneath and a separate yet seamlessly integrated curved edge that follows the domed sapphire. Combined with the case’s double-domed sapphire and edge-to-edge bezel-less design, the watch has a remarkable three-dimensionality when viewing it from an angle.

That said, from an aesthetic standpoint, I won’t lie and say that it’s my favorite watch of the year. The choice to go nearly completely monotone washes it out quite a bit. Nothing pops, nor does the choice of glass on white with silver hands make a particularly legible watch. IWC’s photos give it more dimension, but I didn’t feel that in person. 

It’s certainly visually different from the rest of the perpetual calendars in IWC’s lineup. But when you knock it out of the park on technical achievement, I feel like you want the watch to feel like a gut punch of beauty and design. The movement finishing is also a more commercial-grade product than something that touches the technical achievements of the highest of high-horology. But in doing so and not focusing on high-end hand finishing, I’m sure IWC has kept costs down substantially.

That’s also somewhat unfair for me to say because I don’t know what I would do differently. I would be a terrible watch designer. A blue lacquer dial would have maybe popped more. Maybe blued indices and hands against the white dial would have helped. I’m not quite sure. I do know that the obsidian black dials against a gold case are exactly the kind of punch that takes these watches to a new level.

There are plenty of people who love the Eternal Calendar and the Portugeiser line in general. It seems like the best option on the market if you want a larger, eye-catching, dressier watch (with or without a complication). Personally, IWC is still the brand I would turn to for an affordable split-second chronograph or a pilot’s watch. The Portugieser line, however, seems to be a strong pillar for them today. Against the backdrop of improving and tweaking the Portugeiser collection, the Eternal Calendar works as a halo piece. But it also highlights how good the Portugieser still looks across the board.

It’s nice that IWC has made it simple to set via the crown; I’d never have to worry about the moon phase accuracy as it’s tied to the rest of the calendar. However, like with the rest of IWC’s calendars, if you go past today’s date on the Eternal Calendar, you will have to put the watch down, let the 7-day power reserve run out, and wait to set it again. Unlike Marty McFly, we can’t go back. But maybe that’s a small price to pay.

If anything, the Eternal Calendar was a learning moment for me, reminding me that just because I don’t necessarily love something doesn’t mean that others might not feel differently. My job isn’t to be relentlessly positive (though I do try to write mostly about things I love – there’s too much good stuff out there to choose to be negative for the sake of being mean) or be a mouthpiece for brands. But if I do have criticisms, it’s my responsibility to be thoughtful about them.

The Eternal Calendar was a monumental achievement, not just for the brand but for the industry as a whole. More importantly, from an emotional standpoint, IWC cracked the code while staying true to its roots, history, and Kurt Klaus’ influence on the brand. In doing so, it joined a pantheon that few others have dreamed of. Hats off to them for the win at GPHG. I can’t wait to see what they can do next.

For more on the IWC Portugieser Eternal Calendar, visit the brand’s website.

​Hodinkee 

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