The “One and Only” Wine Test for Watch Getting

I came from the wine trade, and before I fell into the horological rabbit hole, there was an exercise I would often do when I tried and liked a wine. It went like this: “Is this wine a wine I could live with, day in and day out, possibly even as the one and only wine I would ever enjoy, if I were stranded on some unreachable island in the middle of nowhere?”

The task at hand was to ferret out just how much I liked a particular wine. And in more than a few cases, there were wines that met the challenge. So, too, with watches, I’ve adopted that parlor game.

How My Wine Cellar Primed Me For Watch Collecting

During a lengthy career in the wine trade, I came into possession of a number of wines. Enough to fill a walk-in closet and then a stand-alone cooler. Not to mention various wines in closets and fridges. Some of these wines I’ve held onto for 30 years or longer. In that time, I’ve learned a few things about collecting, and about myself. So, when I started to acquire watches, I knew a little about collecting things.

Disclaimer: Collecting wine and collecting watches have some distinct differences. Namely, that wine is a consumable product, which once you open the bottle, it ceases to be part of a collection. Watches are more similar to art or coins or cars or anything that doesn’t have as short of a life span as wine, which is a living product and prone to mortality. Watches, as my first post noted, can be passed down to heirs. Wine can be too, but the clock is still ticking on every bottle of wine.

Time and the Power of 10

^{♫ Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin', into the future ♫}

I’m fascinated with numbers and the power of 10. When I first started getting into watches, much like wine, I wanted to find value in different price categories. I sought out watches that I could enjoy at all different levels and set up a up a wish list of watches at different powers of 10, namely 10², 10³ and 10⁴.

How a First Watch Turned Out to be My Grail Watch

One sunny day, while having a long al fresco lunch with a friend during the height of the Covid 19 pandemic, I noticed a slim, sleek timepiece on his wrist. "What in heaven’s name is that?" He took it off and handed it to me. “Try it on. It’s the next Royal Oak, the next Nautilus, the next Daytona!” I had no idea what he was saying, bandying about all those names. He could have easily said, "The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program." It would have made as much sense to me at the time.

But I did as he said, and in a quick second, my wrist transformed. All of a sudden, I wasn’t some doddering Umarell looking for an excavation site. I went from Clark Kent to Superman in an instant. I was thin, I was handsome, I was brilliant. Well, maybe the wine we were drinking had something to do with it. I was probably more actually delusional. But the watch on my left hand was all that. It was dazzling. It was the Bulgari OctoFinissimo Titanium.