Review: Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Chronograph Calendar

Picture the scene: you’ve got £10-15,000 to spend—lucky you—you’re looking to buy a watch and you’ve got a soft spot for chronographs. The default choice, requiring another good dollop of luck and more than likely a whole lot more spend, is the Rolex Daytona. Classic choice. Nice one. But even if you could get one, I’d say hold up a sec—because I think you’ll like this more.

The Brand

The thing about Rolex is that everyone’s heard of it. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your point of view. The power of that single word is not lost on me at all—in fact you could say it’s rather OP. It’s up there with Hoover, Sellotape and Coca-Cola for industry domination, adding so much more cachet than the package would otherwise suggest.

Jaeger-LeCoultre, on the other hand, doesn’t so much sit in the shadows as it does sweep the alley behind the wall upon which the shadow is cast. Whichever way you cut it, it can’t even muster ten percent of Rolex’s impact. When you think of those time lapse shots of crowds of people on the street walking by, almost none of them will have heard of Jaeger-LeCoultre.

Doesn’t sound like much of a reason to buy one, but that’s the power of perception. A whole bunch of people in that crowd will have heard of Rolex, and they’ll know it’s a flashy brand—and that’s it. Those who know about Jaeger-LeCoultre know a little more about it than that.

You may be one of those people who knows, but if you’re not, here’s why Jaeger-LeCoultre is worth knowing about. Jaeger-LeCoultre is watchmaking. Without Jaeger-LeCoultre, the industry as you see it today would be very different. The watchmaker is responsible for the precision we take for granted, many of the luxury watches we take for granted and even the way they’re made.

I don’t mean that in a fluffy marketing sense; founder Antoine LeCoultre literally developed the tool required to measure precision accurately enough to make a modern watch. Coming from a family trade in metallurgy, Antoine was able to industrialise the very nomadic—and low quality—business of Swiss watchmaking, paving the way for the empire you see before you now.

Another way to demonstrate the impact Jaeger-LeCoultre has had is to list the brands that have relied upon its movements, and it’s a long one: there’s Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin, IWC, Panerai, Cartier, Chopard, Breguet, Piaget—and those are just the ones we know about. There are a lot of big names in that list—the biggest—all of which have relied upon Jaeger-LeCoultre for its watchmaking. It is therefore, by default, the greatest watchmaker of all time.

The Mechanism

It would be pretty rubbish if the greatest watchmaker of all time spent so much of that time making great watchmaking for other watchmakers that it neglected its own watchmaking, so here is the Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Chronograph Calendar, an example of what watchmaking can really mean.

Let’s take the Rolex Daytona by way of a comparison. You get a column-wheel chronograph movement with three days of power reserve—and that’s it. Functional, yes. Inspiring? Not so much. I’m going to assume that if you’ve made it this far that you’re looking for something more, and the Master Chronograph Calendar is willing to deliver.

The Jaeger-LeCoultre calibre 759 too gets a chronograph, also governed by a column wheel and also with a power reserve nudging the three day mark. But Jaeger-LeCoultre didn’t stop there, because when you’ve got the knowhow to make watches with gyrotourbillons and Westminster chimes—words Rolex probably doesn’t even know how to spell—for £13,000, just £1,400 more than the Daytona, you can make a lot of magic happen.

That magic comes in the form of three additional windows on the Master Chronograph Calendar’s dial, which the more astute of you will realise makes up the “Calendar” portion of the watch’s name. There’s a day, a month and a moonphase, all adjustable via hidden pushers around the case; even the fairly ordinary date complication arranged around the lower sub-dial is something the Daytona can’t compete with.

Before you get your hopes up thinking this is an annual or even perpetual calendar from Jaeger-LeCoultre for less than £20,000—complications that are smart enough to know when the shorter months are—this is not one of those. It’s a triple calendar, which means at the end of the shorter months you’ll need to advance the calendar on yourself, and whilst the glass half empty crowd will be seeing that as a disappointment, the glass half full lot like myself will recognise it as a more attainable step closer to a high complication from an incredible watchmaker.

And if you’re someone who really likes to see where your money has been spent, unlike the Rolex Daytona, you actually get to see the engine in the Master Chronograph Calendar. Use the chronograph dial-up and you’ll watch the hands spring into action; dial down and it’ll be the column wheel providing the entertainment instead. That solid gold winding rotor’s got to be worth a few quid, too.

The Design

Given how Jaeger-LeCoultre’s reputation is built on providing the innards to other watchmaker’s outers, it would stand as a point of concern that Jaeger-LeCoultre’s packaging could leave a lot to be desired. Here in steel, at 40mm across and 12mm thick, it is nigh-on identical to the proportions of the Daytona, despite the extra complexity. It gets half the Daytona’s water resistance, down to just 50m, a little less luminous paint on the hands and dial, and twin pushers to activate the chronograph that don’t screw down. Practically, it’s, well, a little underwhelming.

But that’s underselling what is perhaps the Master Chronograph Calendar’s biggest selling point: the way it looks. Jaeger-LeCoultre is understandably very reserved in the styling of its watches, perhaps to its detriment, shying away from carving a distinct personality for itself in fear of being rejected. Like the quiet kid at the back of the class who turned out to be a genius, it would rather say nothing.

With the Master Chronograph Calendar, however, Jaeger-LeCoultre has found its voice. It’s not a whisper like it has been, and it’s not a drunken shout like a Hublot. It’s James Earl Jones. From the sculpturally perfect proportions of the case, square pushers and knurled crown set unobtrusively on one side, to the rich, full dial, the Master Chronograph Calendar is an achingly good-looking thing.

Even those who mourn the loss of a full calendar complication can’t deny that its lighter-touch compatriot has brought this dial to life. We’ve seen Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Chronographs before, and while indeed suitably handsome, they have tended to be a bit forgettable. This is the Henry Caville edition, complete with a pair of deep blue eyes you just can’t break away from.

It’s as much about the nuance as it is the whole. This is a very monochromatic design, and so the flashes of colour punch all the harder. There’s the blue across the chronograph and the moon phase, and then there’s the red you’ll see demarcating the twelve o’clock position of every dial. It’s so well considered, but not overthought. This feels like the work a few great minds and not a boardroom full of mediocre ones.

Whether you study the individual details, like the stepped sub-dials, steel-framed windows or prismoidal markers, or sit back and let the whole gel together, you’ll be in no doubt that this is quite simply one of the best-looking watches to come out of Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Le Sentier headquarters. Better looking than the Rolex Daytona? Look me in the eye and tell me it’s not.

The elephant in the room here is residuals. If you can get hold of the Rolex Daytona at RRP, it’ll be saleable for enough to by yourself two Master Chronograph Calendars. If the Daytona really is the watch you want, then fair enough, but I think the Jaeger-LeCoultre demands a bit of old-school thinking when it comes to making a purchase decision. What I mean is that it’s a watch that you buy because the brand is incredible, the movement is fantastic and the looks are killer. Because you intend to keep it in your ownership forever. Because you’re so smitten with it you just have to have it. Remember when that was the reason we bought watches?

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