Nancy Olson highlights two fountain pens celebrating the Chinese Year of the Ox in 2021: Caran d’Ache’s Year of the Ox shows off the brand’s technical expertise in engraving and use of Chinese lacquer, while Montblanc’s Legend of Zodiacs: Celebrating the Year of the Ox is hand-engraved with engaging representations of an ox with corncobs.
On the eve of Super Bowl LV, Elizabeth Doerr takes a look at American football legends Terry Bradshaw, John Harbaugh, and Aaron Rodgers and their watch stories.
Anyone seriously interested will have some fun poking around all the results of the Best Wine of the World competition. Here Ken Gargett explains a bit about different methods of judging wine (surprise, he thinks the Aussie way is best), talks some anecdotal background, and reveals a gaggle of winners.
Those of you who share the collecting bug see where GaryG is going: the start of a journey of learning about Native American arts and the artists behind them while amassing a set of treasured items that now stretches well beyond what he would have predicted. And he ups the fun by matching up rings, buckles, cufflinks, and bolos with watches.
One of the great pleasures GaryG has of being a contributor here at Quill & Pad is that it gives him an excuse to set aside other priorities on a regular basis and immerse himself in the world of macro watch photography. Along the way, he has been asked by a number of folks to reveal techniques that he uses to create the images you see in his articles, so here he shares some of his tips.
Fine watches and fine whisky, for many the two go together like single malt birds of a feather. Urwerk founders Felix Baumgartner and Martin Frei have been known to enjoy a smooth amber tipple or two, and as discerning gentlemen with discerning taste in haute horlogerie it’s perhaps not surprising that Baumgartner and Frei also have discerning taste when it comes to whisky: single malt by The Macallan.
It seems only appropriate that such a fascinating champagne Grower as Ulysse Collin has an even more fascinating backstory. David heading toward toppling a sparkling Goliath. For well over 200 years, since 1812, the Collin family had worked vineyards in the region and for a century of that time also worked as coopers. The family vineyards were first lost, then recovered, and now the firm goes from strength to strength, slowly but surely building the crown as king of the Grower movement.
GaryG ordered a Hasselblad X1D. He had never shot with a medium-format camera before, and the resolving power, color rendering, and ability to seemingly wrap light around a subject completely blew him away. So when Hasselblad announced that it would be offering a 120 mm macro lens for the X1D, he was among the very first to sign up. But did it make a difference in his watch photography?
The idea of Last Drop is to source rare and first-class spirits, usually with considerable age. Some of these products – and in the company’s decade of operations, there have only been 13 releases – are extremely limited and seriously expensive. But is it worth it? Ken Gargett reverently sips a dram and shares the results with us here.
The phenomenal young tennis player Naomi Osaka is a risk taker, ultra-talented player, and all-around nice person, a shining beacon of hopeful light inspiring athletic joy and re-inspiring tennis audiences. And as Elizabeth Doerr reports, Osaka is now a new TAG Heuer ambassador.