Drops of God, Apple TV+’s new hit series, is as fascinating as it is surprising. With its origins in a Japanese manga, the series tells the story of two people competing for a multimillion-dollar wine collection. A scenario tailor-made to appeal to wine lovers… but not only!
In 2004, Weekly Morning magazine published its first manga about wine. Written by Tadashi Agi and drawn by Shu Okimoto, it told the unusual story of a Japanese man forced to become an expert in oenology in order to appropriate his late father’s vast and expensive wine collection. 19 years later, a series produced by Apple TV+ took up the same story and enjoyed worldwide success. Anecdotal? Yet there’s a reason why Drops of God received a 100% score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 96% score from users who watched it.
French actress Fleur Geffrier co-stars with Japanese actor Tomohisa Yamashita in this eight-episode series. She plays Camille Léger, a young woman who must master and correctly identify the properties of thirteen wines in order to inherit the multi-million euro collection of her recently deceased father. Opposite her, Yamashita plays Issei Tomine, a renowned young oenologist from Tokyo and the spiritual son of Camille’s father. The latter has been offered the same opportunity to win these precious wines. The duo engage in a tense duel of the senses, as Camille realizes that she possesses exceptional taste and smell abilities and can rival Issei’s wine expertise.
The series launched on Apple TV+ on April 21. In the UK, the Telegraph review said the series exuded “strong notes of The Queen’s Gambit”, the Netflix series starring Anya Taylor-Joy that made the world of chess sexy and captivating. On the other hand, many Internet users are declaring that this is a wine-lover’s version of the Succession series.
Visual adaptation
The TV concept was born when international co-production specialist Dynamic acquired the rights to the manga from Kodansha. Prior to this, the series’ partner and executive producer, Klaus Zimmermann, had noticed that the comic strip was popular in both Japan and wine-loving France. And he contacted an old acquaintance, Quoc Dang Tran, the scriptwriter of Marianne and Parallèles, to consider an adaptation.
“I read the manga and thought it would be impossible, but I didn’t say no right away”, Tran recalls. “I thought about it overnight and, even though I’m a wine neophyte, there were things that appealed to me, like the family relationships.”
Shooting took place in Japan, France and Italy. The series budget is estimated at around $30 million. Legendary Television has secured international sales rights and a major worldwide agreement with Apple TV+.
Fascination
Just as you don’t need to know anything about corporate America to be captivated by Succession, the same applies to the wine industry depicted in Drops of God. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know a Chardonnay from a Riesling, or even a red from a white. On the contrary, lack of knowledge can make Drops of God even more appealing, as it lifts the curtain on a fascinating world for most casual viewers.
Tasty sequences bring wine tasting to life in a very visceral way. Images of the flavors of each sip hover in the air before Camille at different moments. Each wine evokes memories that take our protagonists back in time, revealing their inner world directly on screen.
This series is one of the few scripted co-productions between Europe and Asia. In recent years, this practice has been limited to drama series such as Giri-Haji (2019) from the BBC and Netflix, and Tokyo Vice (2022) from HBO Max and Wowow.
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Featured photo : © Apple TV+
