The Oris And Cervo Volante Collab Is Back With A Burgundy Dial 40mm Pointer Date

Switzerland culls roughly 15,000 red deer a year to stop them from stripping its alpine forests. Cervo Volante, a Swiss leather company, takes the hides that would otherwise be thrown away, and repurposes them into a wide variety of products. For the past four years, they've been working with Oris to make special edition watches with red deer hide straps. The latest result is a steel 40mm Big Crown Pointer Date with a burgundy dial.

The case is 40mm wide and 12.2mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 48.2mm, which means that it might exclude the smaller wrists among us. Oris polishes the coin-edge bezel and brushes the tops of the lugs, which gives us a pretty fantastic contrast. The oversized crown screws down, the sapphire is domed on both sides with anti-reflective coating, and the back is mineral glass. Water resistance is 50 meters.

The dial is all burgundy, and right now it's one of my favorite dial colors. Cathedral hands and old-style Arabic numerals give it a bunch of character, and the numerals, hands and minute markers are all filled with stark white Super-LumiNova. The date runs around the edge, pointed to by a red-tipped central hand.

Inside is the Oris calibre 754, a Sellita SW 200-1 with a pointer-date module added. It beats at 4Hz, holds 41 hours of reserve, hacks, and is wound with the familiar red Oris rotor. The strap is dark brown deerskin, vegetable-tanned at one of Switzerland's few remaining tanneries of that kind, with natural marks left in. It's soft, it will age quickly, and will look fantastic.

The Oris Big Crown Pointer Date x Cervo Volante is not a limited edition, it's available now and it's priced at CHF 2,250. See more on the Oris website.