Selten Yum Cha

Selten has released a limited hand-wound watch called Yum Cha, made with grand feu enamel, for £3,662. Yum cha is the Cantonese practice of drinking tea and eating dim sum, usually with several generations of a family, usually loudly, usually on a Sunday morning.

Grand feu enamel is the reason for the price and it is worth knowing why it is expensive. Powdered glass is laid onto a metal dial and fired above 800 degrees, repeatedly, and each firing can destroy the dial. Yields are poor, the work cannot be rushed or automated, and the people who do it well are countable. Nothing else produces that particular depth, and enamel does not fade, so the dial will outlive the movement behind it.

What makes this release interesting is not the technique but the subject. Watch dials are overwhelmingly about the same handful of things: the sea, aviation, motorsport, the moon, and occasionally a mountain. An enamel dial about a family meal is a genuinely unusual choice, and it is aimed squarely at people for whom that meal is a specific memory rather than a theme. That is a much smaller audience than divers, and a much more certain one.

Three and a half thousand pounds is real money for a hand-wound watch with no complication. You are paying for the dial. You should be.