The Drops of God – Episode 1

Content Warning: discussion of alcohol and consumption of alcohol, loss of a parent, depictions of a decapitated head

What’s it about? Growing up under the shadow of his father, Toyotaka Kanzaki loathed the wine that made his father so famous. He assures everyone he knows nothing about wine, yet his innate techniques at decantering and ability to provide tasting notes betrays that his father likely trained him the how-to’s of a wine critic well before he could even legally drink. Now with his father’s passing, he stands to inherit billions of yen in rare wines, but the young office worker, who has never taken a sip of wine, must face off against the “prince of the wine world” to secure his place.

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While some may argue that age brings complexity and maturity, fans should look to The Drops of God not as a maturation of the series but a new vintage from a storied cellar. And in my opinion this vintage, while serviceable, fails to live up to its legacy perhaps due to its vintage year and the corresponding challenges impacting its production.

Still, the latest retelling of the popular wine-tasting saga still embodies what it’s known for with tastes of nostalgia and approachability. 

Moreover, we’re still on the first chapter, so it’s perhaps very difficult to open up the full bouquet of the show yet to come. The Drops of God, after all, did age with time over the course of 72 volumes and three arcs over two decades.

In any case, it’s worth noting that we are going back to square one 22 years after the series first debuted, and the series also comes in after two separate live-action adaptations in 2009 and 2023. The most recent adaptation is even highlighted as a multi-national production between Japan, France and the U.S. There is a lot of pomp associated with The Drops of God and its serious knowledge and contemplation of real-world wines, so it drives up its value by name alone. This isn’t too dissimilar to how buyers will invest thousands of dollars for a bottle of the latest vintage of Romanée-Conti despite no one having even tasted it before its release.

And to some degree, The Drops of God is a known enough factor with that kind of hype and reliability. Fans of the manga and drama know that, no matter what this current vintage brings, it’s still an adaptation of a wonderful series. Toyotaka is a relatable every-man who is able to talk wine like a complete and utter neophyte to ease in readers to the wide world of wine. It breaks down the stuffy snobbish air established by people Alan Rickman would play in a movie and lets Toyotaka be the surrogate who asks all the newbie questions despite being well-equipped to smell, taste and observe wine.

Moreover, the series is technically adapted well. The Drops of God loves to talk about wine and gets a rather slow start in the manga. The adaptation condenses a fair amount of the story and reorients it to play better in a 24 minute format, replaying the same story beats but with a different rhythm. It works well on this end and there’s sufficient build up to get people excited to wait for the next episode, although some might wonder if they’ve butchered the source material as well.

But while the tasting notes deliver excitement, holding the glass up to the light reveals that there are still some lacking elements.

Coming in two years after its run on AppleTV and finishing up its latest manga arc, The Drops of God might have lacked that little extra flourish in its appeal to get the really special treatment it should have deserved in a crowded spring cour. The 3D fluid graphics are glaringly noticeable standing out as Kanzaki pours. At the same time, models of characters’ faces fall apart on anything further out than a medium shot framing of a character.

There’s intense beauty while detailing our protagonists appreciating and contemplating tasting notes and smells throughout the episode, but anything peripheral to that feels like an afterthought that reminds you this show probably didn’t get the artistic attention to detail it truly wished to have. 

Still, at the end of the day, do I truly care how good Kanzaki’s boss looks in this over-the-shoulder shot or the fluid physics in this emotional scene?

Hoo boy. I guess I do.

Well, it’s fine. There are some genuinely good scenes especially as Toyotaka interprets tasting notes with berries, coffee and Queen for a 2001 bottle of Château Mont-Pérat while Issei Tomine, his rival wine critic, has a religious moment sipping a bottle of Miani and interpreting it as the opera of Salome, specifically where Salome dotes on the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter.

These are incredibly wild interpretations of wine fused with practical lessons on storied wine makers from around the world. It’s fun for both seasoned enthusiasts and curious onlookers who might gain an interesting talking point or two at the next house party.

Yet, that might just be it for this series for some. Reading the comic back when it was serialized in the mid-naughts, Tadashi Agi (a pseudonym for siblings Shin and Yuko Kibayashi) wrote the comic to introduce readers to a variety of wines and their stories, sometimes in rapid fire. It’s dense and devoted to talking about wine as much as telling a story.

In cutting so much of the wine talk and reorienting the series to be about Toyotaka’s adventures, does this show have something to stand on, especially since so much of the story revolves around the wines Toyotaka encounters? After all, we are in a much different world compared to 2004. Wine, as an industry, has generally declined and we’re going to be talking about wines that people were talking up 22 years ago. Henri Jayer has been dead for 20 years.

Some of these wines were hard to find when the manga came out. Revisiting them today feels all the more decadent and even further from reach. So then who is this show for?

At this point, it might be for the Romanée-Conti crowd.