Glashütte Original’s new Senator Excellence Perpetual Calendar is based around the brand’s Calibre 36, a cleverly designed, technically advanced workhorse movement. We spent a week with it.

by James Buttery

Glashütte Original?s new perpetual calendar builds, quite literally, on the German brand?s biggest development in recent years, the impressive Calibre 36. The automatic base calibre boasts not only 100 hours power reserve on a single 68cm mainspring and a bayonet-fitting movement mount but also undergoes a 24-day barrage of tests that would certainly seem to be far more intensive than the independent COSC procedure. Owners of Calibre 36-based watches are then presented with individual certificates listing the most obvious of these test results, while an online portal offers a deeper look its performance and the tests themselves. Glashütte Original had enough faith in the performance of this new movement to create the range-topping Senator Excellence collection especially for it. This collection already includes a three-hander, grand date and grand date moon phase alongside the new Calibre 36-02 based perpetual calendar.
Dial

The perpetual calendar presents day, grand date, month and moon phase along with a slightly superfluous leap year indicator that would have been, were the Calibre 36-02 an integrated perpetual calendar, better reserved for the caseback side. The grand date is simply one of the best on the market, consisting of two concentr...