Review: Exquisite Drops of God brings the world of elite wine down to earth

The heady world of fine wine is often justly skewered as being hopelessly elitist and pretentious, where rare bottles sell for tens of thousands of dollars, their flavors and aromas described in florid, over-the-top language that readily lends itself to satire. (The sommelier in last year's delightful The Menu described a pinot noir as having "notes of longing and regret.")

That's the pop culture caricature, at least. If you yearn for something that brings this rarefied world firmly down to earth and celebrates wine's role in forging human bonds and shaping culture at large, I highly recommend Drops of God, a limited miniseries that debuted on Apple TV+ in April. It is based on the popular and influential manga of the same name. This is a series that sticks with you, its most memorable moments lingering in one's mind the way a good wine lingers on the palate.

(Some spoilers below but no major reveals.)

The Japanese manga series debuted in November 2004 in Japan's weekly Morning magazine, running through June 2014. It was followed by a sequel that added the element of food pairings, Marriage: The Drops of God Final Arc. Brother and sister creators Yuko and Shin Kibayashi became enthralled by the elite wine world after sampling a rare vintage and decided to create a manga series centered on the complexity and cultural impact of wine. Naturally, that meant conducting a lot of research, tasting wines from all over the world, spanning a broad range of price points.

Camille has a powerful sense of smell and taste but little formal training

Credit: Apple TV+

Their inspiring ethos was a Japanese winemaker's motto regarding the essential elements of wine: heaven (vintage, or the weather/climate of a given geographical region), earth (terroir), and people, in the form of gifted winemakers. There are more than 15 million copies of the manga in circulation, and it has significantly boosted sales (and prices) of the specific wines mentioned in Japan. In fact, one winemaker stopped selling his 2003 vintage of Chateau le Puy after it was name-checked in the manga to discourage wealthy speculators and keep prices affordable.

Although the Kibayashi siblings have stated that wine is the main character, the manga storyline centers on two young men: Shizuku Kanzaki and Issei Tomine. Shizuku works for a beer manufacturing company. He's estranged from his father, a world-renowned wine critic named Yutaka Kanzaki, who taught his son various aspects of oenology until Shizuku rebelled as a teenager. While his expert knowledge is limited and he has never actually drunk wine (until the start of the series), Shizuku possesses a rare sense of taste and smell, enabling him to discern subtle notes in any given bottle and describe them with a certain poetic flair. Issei is the adopted son of Yutaka, himself a highly respected wine critic, who has been studying wine for much of his life and brings a more cerebral, methodical—indeed almost obsessive—approach to oenology.

Issei is a highly trained and gifted oenologist—the "spiritual son" of late wine critic Alexandre Leger.

The instigating event is a tragedy: Yutaka dies of pancreatic cancer and leaves behind a particularly manipulative and idiosyncratic will. His entire fortune—largely consisting of a prestigious wine collection worth millions—will go to whichever of his two sons can correctly identify 14 different wines and describe them as closely as possible to Yutaka's own descriptions of each bottle in the will. The first 12 bottles are dubbed the "Twelve Apostles," and the 13th is the titular "Drops of God."

When French-Vietnamese screenwriter Quoc Dang Tran (who also worked on the French Netflix series Call My Agent) agreed to adapt the manga for television, he kept that basic premise but also made some significant changes. For starters, the deceased father is now a French wine critic named Alexandre Leger (Stanley Weber), who has long been estranged from his daughter Camille (Fleur Geffrier) when he learns he is dying. (In a nod to the manga, Camille's middle name is Shizuku, since she spent part of her childhood in Japan.) Camille flies to Tokyo upon hearing the news but arrives too late: her father has died. And his will pits her against Alexandre's top oenology student and "spiritual son" Issei Tomine (Tomohisa Yamashita) for his multimillion-dollar legacy.

The competition featured in the series has been simplified to just three rounds, and the individual tests go well beyond merely identifying mystery wines in blind tastings. Camille is at a distinct disadvantage despite her naturally gifted palate. Even though her father taught her the basics when she was 8 years old, a traumatic event from that period has rendered her so sensitive to strong flavors that she can't drink at all without getting a nosebleed and subsists almost entirely on white rice and green beans. She receives help from her father's best friend, vintner Philippe Chassangre (Gustave Kervern) and Philippe's strikingly handsome son Thomas (Tom Wozniczka), a professor of oenology, among other allies.

Camille finds an ally and a potential romantic interest in French oenologist Thomas Chassangre (Tom Wozniczka).

Credit: Apple TV+

Issei's challenges during the competition, by contrast, have more to do with family tensions—his uber-wealthy family disapproves of his interest in wine and wants him to take over the family diamond business—and secrets buried deep in the past. Where Camille is all instinct and emotion, Issei is about strict discipline and control, although he is quietly, deeply passionate about his chosen field. I mean, he collects soil samples from vineyards all over the world to enhance his understanding of terroir. That's commitment. He finds his own ally in ambitious journalist Yurika Katase (Azusa Okamoto). Camille and Issei follow parallel journeys of personal growth over the course of the eight episodes, gradually converging into the final showdown.

Tran's decision to make this an international series—it was shot in French, English, and Japanese (with a bit of Italian in one episode for good measure)—weaves a few more threads into an already intricate, richly textured tapestry. Wine is a global phenomenon, but there are nonetheless regional rivalries. Pitting a Japanese oenologist against the French daughter of a world-famous French wine critic brings a human face to the tension between classic French expertise in viticulture and Japan's burgeoning passion for wine over the last several decades. It also enabled Tran to expand his visual canvas to shoot on location in three different countries (Japan, France, and Italy), all of which are gloriously rendered.

Issei and Camille engaged in one of Alexandre Leger's fiendish tests.

Credit: Apple TV+

Each cast member gives an extraordinary performance. All the characters—and their relationships with each other—feel genuine and fully realized, even those with relatively minor roles, such as Lidia Vitale's nuanced portrayal of an Italian woman grieving the loss of her eccentric vintner father.

Weber shines as the late Alexandre Leger, revealed via flashbacks to be handsome, bold, intelligent, and charismatic but also brusque, manipulative, arrogant, selfish, impulsive, and unyielding. His disdain for legacy "prestigious" wines in favor of ferreting out newer, unknown vintages that take risks earns him more than a few enemies, even as it fuels his eventual global success. While he clearly loved Camille and his prized student, Issei, his winner-takes-all will is inherently cruel—he's just too enamored of his own cleverness, even at death's door, to listen to his lawyer's cautionary entreaties. "Inheritances are tragedies," the lawyer, M. Talion (Antoine Chappey), tells Philippe at one point, and this one has even more potential for a devastating outcome.

Geffrier and Yamashita are perfectly cast and expertly play off each other's performances. Camille has some of the same attributes as her father, only without the arrogance and cruel streak; if anything, she lacks confidence. Her synesthesia when it comes to aromas and flavors also provides a clever means of visualizing the sensory aspects of tasting wine: Camille can literally "see" the flavors or hear them expressed as musical notes. When her senses become overwhelmed, she is enveloped in an exploding cloud of kaleidoscopic colors. To Issei, this seems like a superpower, and he finds his own confidence shaken in response.

"That's a lot of drops": Camille and Issei contemplate Alexandre's extensive wine cellar.

Credit: Apple TV+

While the Drops of God manga is lively and often irreverent, the series is more somber and serious, though it's not without some lovely humorous interludes. The eight episodes are loosely structured in pairs of mini-arcs, and while the competition provides a solid framework, this is about so much more than merely tasting good wine. Drops of God tells an engrossing, layered story that unfolds gradually in progressive stages, like the way a bottle of wine opens up as it aerates over the course of a meal, bringing forth new and sometimes surprising notes. Tran and his director, Oded Ruskin, wisely let that story unfold at a leisurely pace that never drags or rushes.

As for those "drops of god," in the manga, there is no one such bottle of wine identified, in recognition of the inherently subjective nature of taste in wine. Everyone's "drops of god" will be different. The series supplies its own answer of sorts. It's to Tran's credit that the "solution" makes both narrative and thematic sense and brings the story to a lyrical, emotionally satisfying close.

All episodes of Drops of God are now streaming on Apple TV+ in French, Japanese, and English.