Offering affordable, well-designed, vintage-inspired watches, I’ve always had my eye on Baltic. Their Aquascaphe watch in particular has gained a lot of attention over recent years. It’s a nicely sized, distinctly vintage-inspired dive watch with decent specs at good value. For their latest launch, they’re going down a slightly different path, one that will attract lovers of field watches. Let us introduce you to the new Baltic Hermétique Tourer watch collection…
The new Hermétique collection in its first edition delivers four new tool watches designed for exploration and everyday life. They are wonderfully sized at 37mm wide and engineered from 316L stainless steel. The metal is brushed horizontally along the sides, circularly on the lugs while the perfectly round, slightly sloped bezel is brightly polished.
For a field watch, the case is relatively slim at 10.8mm tall, much of that accounted for by the double domed sapphire crystal glass. It looks like the kind of case that would wear very easily thanks to its height, tapered lugs and integrated crown. The latter allows you to wear it on the right or left wrist – that’s good news for someone like me that controversially wears their watches on the right wrist. The case also has a water resistant rating of 150 metres.
For me, the star of the show here is the dial. The Baltic Hermétique Tourer watch is available in four colourways: green, blue, beige or brown. The blue and green dials are classics and definitely fit the genre of the field watch. The beige and brown displays, on the other hand, are overtly different but wonderfully match the aesthetic. The cream dial is a personal favourite and brings together the adventure watch design with colours typically seen in vintage dress watches.
The dials present the matte centre in one of four colours with an outer ring brushed black with a printed white railway track. The numerals and baton indexes are large, notably raised and generously adorned in Superluminova to match with the luminous syringe-shaped steel hour and minute hands. The seconds hand also has its own glow in the dark lollipop tip.
Powering the Baltic Hermétique Tourer watches is the Miyota 9039 automatic winding movement. It’s a solid Japanese-made movement with a 42-hour power reserve, stop second function, 24 jewels and a frequency of 28,800vph. Completing the watches is a choice of three straps: a flat link metal bracelet, a beads of rice bracelet or a tropic rubber strap coloured in the same hue as its respective dial.
I really like these designs. They remind me of the Seiko Alpinist in some ways – and that’s not a bad thing. It’s got a very vintage-esque field watch aesthetic and the colours used on the dials are beautiful. I could easily wear any of the offerings here, but that creamy beige dial in particular is stunning. I would really like to see this watch in person and see if it lives up to the imagery.
The Baltic Hermétique Tourer watches are available to order from 10th October and the first 200 units of each model will be numbered from 1 to 200 with an engraved case back (stock is not limited to 200 watches per model, the following ones will only be unnumbered).
Technical Specifications:
- Brand: Baltic
- Model: Hermétique Tourer
- Price: Starts from €500
- Material: Stainless steel
- Movement: Miyota 9039 automatic
- Complications: Hours, minutes, seconds
- Dial: Blue, green, beige or brown with Superluminova hands and numerals
- Size: 37mm wide, 10.8mm tall
- When the reviewer would personally wear it: It’s a wonderful day-to-day watch and all four dial colours feel very autumnal.
- A friend we’d recommend it to first: A fan of field watches.
- Best characteristics of the watch: The case size is spot on and the dial colours and raised numerals are stunning. The integrated crown is another nice touch.
- The worst characteristics of the watch: There’s little to hate on.
