IWC Portofino Automatic 40 IW356501

The storyWhy this reference matters

Through the seventies IWC was building pocket watches around good-sized Lépine calibres. In 1984 somebody had the idea of putting one of those movements into a case with lugs and selling it as a wristwatch: reference 5251, with a gold moon phase on a blue ground that collectors ended up christening the fried egg. The collection took its name from Portofino, the fishing village on the Ligurian coast where the people who could afford to moored their boats.

That piece set the vocabulary for the whole family: a round case with a thin profile, long protruding lugs, a clean dial with nothing spare on it. For the 140th anniversary in 2008 IWC brought back the moon phase with the calibre 98800 and a display back. Then came the 2011 redesign that shapes the current collection, with thinner bezels and tightened proportions, and out of that comes the 40 mm case still in the catalogue today.

The Portofino Automatic 40 is the simplest model in the collection and probably the most honest: three hands, a discreet date at 3, and that's the lot. It's the way into IWC and the brand makes no secret of it. The calibre 35111 is not an in-house development but a Sellita SW300-1 built to IWC's specification, with 25 jewels, 28,800 vibrations per hour and 42 hours of reserve.

SpecificationsThe numbers, in one table

IdentificationHow to tell it apart

What defines a Portofino visually is the lugs: long, straight and clearly separate from the body of the case, inherited directly from the pocket watch it descends from. The profile is thin, well under a centimetre, and the narrow bezel hands almost the entire surface to the dial. If the watch you're looking at has short, integrated lugs, it isn't a Portofino.

The IW356501 is the steel version with a light sunray dial, applied Roman numerals mixed with baton markers, leaf hands and a date window at 3. The strap is 20 mm black alligator; the crystal is domed sapphire with anti-reflective coating on both faces.

Reference 3565 covers a crowd of dial and metal variants, red gold among them. Steel, light dial and black strap is the 356501; any change of dial or metal changes the reference, so don't take the seller's description on trust. Ask for the exact number and check it against the papers.

CollectingWhat collectors check

The fact that weighs most here, and gets said least in shops, is the movement. The calibre 35111 is a Sellita SW300-1 made to IWC's specification. That doesn't make it a bad watch — the SW300 is a reliable base and cheap to maintain — but it explains where the Portofino Automatic sits in the catalogue, and why its 42 hours of reserve look short next to the 120 and the 168 IWC sells one rung up.

On condition, the enemy is polishing. The Portofino case carries a lot of polished surface and thin lugs that an aggressive buffing wheel will round off in two passes. Compare the lug edges against catalogue photographs: once the crispness has gone, that silhouette doesn't return. The light dial, for its part, gives away moisture before anything else does, so look for matt patches or halos around the markers.

This is a watch that gets worn, on leather and without a screw-down crown, and the wear shows. Check the date snaps over cleanly and on time, that the crown has no side play, and that the original alligator isn't cracked at the buckle fold. A new strap is cheap; a polished case has no remedy.

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Close relativesThe ones it gets confused with