Seven grounds receive the oversized six at this size and champagne is not one of them. The treatment goes to silver and olive green on yellow cases, to chocolate and slate on Everose, to pink on white gold, and to dark grey and aubergine across two metal families each; champagne, built on as many references as any of them, is excluded everywhere it appears. Reference 278278 is the 31mm Datejust in yellow gold, carrying a fluted bezel, and this configuration pairs a champagne dial set with twelve diamonds in gold settings, carrying no numerals, with a President bracelet. Champagne comes one way when it is set, and this is that way.
The case is solid yellow gold with the fluted bezel cut into the metal rather than applied as a separate ring. The dial is champagne, a warm pale tone sitting close to the case in value, and twelve round diamonds are mounted at the hours in gold settings matched to it. The settings matter more on this ground than on any other the reference builds. Because the mounts, the case, the bezel and the bracelet are all the same metal, and because the dial itself is only a shade away from that metal, the stones are the single element on the watch that is not gold or a version of it. They read brighter here than they do on a pale silver ground, where the surface competes with them, and less dramatic than on a dark ground, where they separate by contrast rather than by material. There are no numerals, no batons and no printed indexes; the ring of stones and the date window are the only interruptions on the face. Nothing on the watch is brushed, so every surface returns light and the stones have to compete with all of them at once, which is the strongest argument for an even ring over any concentrated arrangement on this particular ground. The President bracelet is semi-circular three-piece links, rounded across their width, and it is the only bracelet this reference offers.
Hours, minutes, running seconds and a date that advances in a single step at midnight rather than easing across into the day that follows. The self-winding movement in the 31mm case holds roughly fifty-five hours of running time, matching the 28mm references rather than the 36mm ones, which use a larger movement of their own. The dial adds nothing to that and is not intended to. Reading it depends entirely on position, since a diamond in a gold mount says nothing about which hour it stands at, and the ring only works while it stays even. The date window at three is the one break in it, and on champagne that break is unusually well absorbed: the window frame is gold, the disc behind it sits close to the ground in tone, and the interruption is smaller in effect than the same window is on a white or silver dial. What the arrangement gives up is a fixed point to read from. On the three grounds here that offer the oversized six, the enlarged numeral tells the eye where the bottom of the dial is before anything else registers. Champagne has no equivalent, so the watch is read from the hands and the ring together, which is marginally slower and almost never a practical problem at this size. The compensation is that nothing on the dial has a fixed orientation, so the face stays symmetrical in a way the numeral versions never are, and a symmetrical dial photographs and wears differently from one with a weighted bottom half.
Champagne set with diamonds names more than one dial. At 28mm it comes with twelve settings, or with twelve settings and a Roman nine in gold carrying eight stones. At 31mm and at 41mm it comes with twelve settings only. At 36mm the name covers three separate arrangements depending on the model: twelve settings on the Datejust, ten baguette-cut stones on the Day-Date, and twelve settings with baguette-cut stones at six and nine on the Day-Date again. At 40mm it is the ten baguettes. Nothing in the name distinguishes any of these from each other, which makes the reference number the only reliable way to know which dial a listing describes. Within this reference the ground sits alongside eight others, and it is one of ten configurations carrying stones on the dial against two that do not. The same ground and the same twelve settings are built on 278288RBR, which is this watch with a bezel set with diamonds; the dial rosters of the two references are identical and the bezel is the only variable between them. On this ground that variable does more than it does elsewhere, because a set bezel above a set champagne dial produces two rings of stones on a single warm field with nothing plain left between them.
This is the most conventional set dial the reference builds, and conventional is the right word rather than a criticism. Champagne with diamonds on a gold Datejust is the arrangement most people picture when they picture the watch at all, and it has been in the catalogue in one form or another for decades. The stones are evenly placed, the ground is warm, the case is warm, and the only cool thing on the watch is the twelve diamonds. That gives the piece a single point of interest and puts it in exactly one place. Anyone who wants the stones to be more visible should take a darker ground, where they separate by contrast rather than by material. Anyone who wants a reading order on the dial has to leave champagne entirely, since the oversized six is not built on it at any size. And anyone who wants the setting outside the crystal should take the diamond-bezel reference, which builds this identical dial and reverses where the attention goes.
