There's been a new bike launched today by titanium experts Van Nicholas, the Rowtag. It's said it can be a gravel bike, an adventure companion, an all-road tourer or an off-road racer. The brand says the drop bar bike is a real cross over happily belonging in any discipline or category.

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Van Nicholas says they have traditionally created bikes for three broad disciplines: road, mountain bike or touring. This time they say they have designed the Rowtag from scratch to be the first Van Nicholas that could happily belong in any of those three categories, although with drop bars and skinny tyres, we'd beg to differ on the mountain bike front. We do understand the brand's thoughts though, this looks like an adventure bike that is willing to traverse varied terrain and can be specced to better suit a number of riding styles and disciplines. 

Van Nicolas says in their press release that the titanium (of course) Rowtag is built around a compact, lively and adaptable frame, that delivers poised performance on rough tracks, smooth roads and anything in between. It can be built with 650B or 700c wheels with tyres volumes up to 2" on 650B wheels and 45c on 700c wheels. The brand says they wanted a large amount of tyre clearance allows the Rowtag to be set up with larger volume knobbly tyres for multi-day bike-packing adventures far off the beaten track.

There are multiple frame mounts (two on the top tube, seat tube and bottom of down tube, as well as three on top of the down tube) to allow for lots of different kit hauling configurations with the full carbon front fork also getting cage mounts.

There are integrated cables throughout and some neat features, the shape of the chainstay yoke is interesting routing the internal front mech cable up from the bottom bracket. Elsewhere the bike gets a press fit bottom bracket, disc brakes, an integrated tapered headset, thru-axles and the internal cable routing provision for a dropper post.

The bike is available as a complete build from the end of January in sizes XS to XL with a total price from €3,449. The frame, including full carbon, gravel front fork, is available for €2,099.

• www.vannicholas.com

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