Blancpain Just Unveiled the Most Impressive Watch In Its Entire 290-Year History

Ask most watch enthusiasts today about Blancpain, and they’ll first point to the Fifty Fathoms diver. But despite the icon’s influence as the world’s first modern dive watch, the Fifty Fathoms is just a small part of the brand’s story.

For instance, when Jean-Claud Biver revived the world’s oldest watch brand in the 1980s after its Quartz Crisis-induced hiatus, the Fifty Fathoms wasn’t part of the plan. Instead, the brand was committed to producing high-end, complicated, mechanical dress watches. The legendary dive didn’t even reenter Blancpain’s permanent catalog until its 2007 relaunch.

So it should come as no surprise that the most impressive watch in Blancpain’s 290-year history has nothing to do with the Fifty Fathoms and everything to do with the brand’s complete mastery in the field of haute horlogerie.

Blancpain

Two-hit wonder

Unveiled today is the Blancpain Double Grande Sonnerie, and it officially takes the crown as the most complicated watch Blancpain has ever made. It also marks an impressive first in all of watchmaking.

Many watchmakers will point to the grande sonnerie as the most difficult complication to assemble, ranking even higher than perpetual calendars, split-seconds chronographs and tourbillons. A grande sonnerie is a chiming complication that automatically plays the hour and respective quarter-hour every fifteen minutes.

Grande sonnerie watches are quite rare, and are sometimes paired with the simpler petite sonnerie complication, which skips the hour when chiming the quarter-hours, and a minute repeater, which chimes the time on demand down to the minute. Blancpain has included all three here, too, but the brand has also done something unprecedented.

Not content to only feature a single grande sonnerie complication, Blancpain’s Double Grande Sonnerie features two, naturally. Not only that, but they feature two different melodies which are selectable via a column-wheel-actuating pusher on the side of the case, a world first.

Blancpain

One melody is the classic Big Ben-derived Westminster chimes sound familiar to fans of chiming watches, while the other is an original composition written by — get this — Eric Singer, who’s best known as the drummer for ’70s rock band KISS.

If you had asked me ahead of time if someone from KISS had anything to do with Blancpain’s most complicated watch, I probably would have said “yes” because why else would anyone ask such a question? But as it turns out, Singer is a massive watch collector and a close friend of Blancpain CEO Marc A. Hayek, so it’s not as odd as it seems. I guess he was made for lovin’ watches.

Back to the watch. The grande sonnerie uniquely plays all four quarter-hour chimes for a veritable symphony 24 times a day. It also makes use of four notes instead of the usual two, with each note being produced by a separate hammer (all four are visible on the skeletonized dial). The hammers interact with a patented gold acoustic membrane integrated into the bezel for booming sound, and a patented silent magnetic regulator controls the pace of the hammers.

The double grande sonnerie alone would be headline worthy, but Blancpain decided to pack as much horological functionality into this watch as humanly possible. So the brand added two power reserve indicators for the movement and chiming mechanism, a retrograde perpetual calendar and a flying tourbillon.

Blancpain

Blancpain invented the flying tourbillon in 1989 (unlike standard tourbillons, its cage is only suspended on one side, giving the illusion that it’s unsupported), and for its implementation here, the brand has increased its oscillation from 3Hz to 4Hz for greater precision, and given its balance a silicon hairspring for amagnetic performance — probably a good idea considering there’s a magnetic regulator in the movement.

All of this insanity is housed in a movement that’s entirely integrated — no bush league modules here — with everything designed, produced, assembled and hand-decorated in-house. The movement’s mainplate and 26 bridges are made of 18Kt gold, and the calibre incorporates five safety mechanisms to prevent you from screwing it up when making adjustments.

All in, Blancpain’s development of the Calibre 15GSQ took eight years, 13 patents and 1,200 technical drawings. It features a whopping 1,053 components and is open-worked, allowing for admiration from both front and back.

Understandably, the Double Grande Sonnerie is a large watch, but Blancpain has made considerable efforts to make it wearable. The case — which is available in either 18K red gold and white gold, both with matching movements and paired with an alligator leather strap equipped with a gold deployant clasp— measures 47mm across, 54.6mm lug-to-lug and, most impressive of all, just 14.5mm thick. It can be manually wound in both directions and, in true Blancpain fashion, has quite a sizable power reserve at 96 hours.

Blancpain

Pricing and availability

As you undoubtedly expected, Blancpain doesn’t plan on churning out these things by the thousands. With just two watchmakers at the manufacture capable of even assembling the beast, Blancpain is limiting production of the Double Grande Sonnerie to just two watches per year.

With that sort of ridiculous exclusivity, you can also expect a mighty hefty price tag. Although Blancpain didn’t include a price in the watch’s press release, Hodinkee clocks it at CHF 1,700,000, which as of this writing converts to a cool $2.1 million. All of a sudden, those $20K Fifty Fathoms divers are looking awfully affordable.

Blancpain

Blancpain Double Grande Sonnerie

Specs

Case Size	47mm
Movement	Blancpain Cal. 15GSQ manual-wind double grande sonnerie perpetual calendar tourbillon
Water Resistance	10m

• $2,100,000 at Blancpain

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