This week 1275 co-hosted an evening with Phillips, pairing six watches with six wines. Not by price, and not by scores. We paired them on character, which meant that in each case the two objects shared something that could not be seen in a glass or through a caseback. It was, in effect, an experiment: put six pairs in front of an informed room and see whether character holds up as a way of choosing things. It did.
What knowing adds
Both wine and watches can be enjoyed at first sight. A wine tastes good or it does not. A movement is beautiful or it is not. That much is available to anyone, immediately.
But it is a thin form of ownership. Knowing who made something, and why, does not improve the object. What it does is explain it: why this wine exists at all, why it tastes the way it does, why the quantity is so small. The object stops being a possession and becomes something you understand.
It also tells you where things are going. A wine tasted blind gives a single data point; tasted with its maker in mind, it gives a direction of travel – whether the bottle is an accident or an intention, and whether that intention will still be there in ten years.
The intention
Watchmaking works the same way, without the soil. The Swiss valleys were a body of knowledge long before they were an address, and a workshop founded there inherits generations of skill it never had to build. Learn that, and a movement stops being an object and becomes the latest instalment of something much older.
This matters for anyone who thinks of a wine collection as a purely financial investment. If the only return you want is a number, wine is a poor way to pursue it, and there are more liquid places to put the money. The return that makes a collection worth building takes a different form: years of learning from people who have dedicated their lives to perfecting one thing.
Where 1275 comes in
Sourcing the finest wines directly is the part of our work people see. What they do not see is the research behind it: meeting the producers, learning how they handled a difficult vintage, understanding what they intend for the future of the estate. That is half of the job.
The other half is matching what we know about the wines to what we know about the person collecting them, facilitating unforgettable experiences through the wines we choose on their behalf. A collection can be bought in an afternoon. Curating it prior to purchase takes much more thought, and understanding it afterwards even more so. Not an inconvenience of collecting wine, but the very pleasure of it.