A CRASH COURSE IN THE WORLD OF PREMIUM WINE
Apple TV+ series ‘Drops of God’, loosely based on bestselling manga books, is drama cloaked in family intrigue that reveals much about the industry
The average TV viewer might not know much about the world of high-end wine, but the creators behind new series Drops of God hope to change that with only eight episodes.
Shot across Japan, France and Italy, the limited series now streaming on Apple TV+ is a trilingual drama cloaked in family intrigue that divulges wineindustry knowledge – how to sip, smell and begin to identify wine – between scenes of love, trauma, mystery and tension.
The show’s premise is based on two lead protagonists who must complete cryptic challenges for an inheritance that includes a wine collection worth nearly US$150 million.
Drops of God is loosely based on the bestselling manga series by siblings Yuko and Shin Kibayashi, which provided readers across the globe with an extensive wine education via more than 40 volumes published over a decade.
With far less time and a different medium, the television series’ team needed to condense that for viewers who have only one season with the characters – while still appealing to fans of the manga.
“There are three categories of people who are going to watch the show,” says series creator Quoc Dang Tran, who also has writing credits on Call My Agent! (2015), Marianne (2019) and Parallels (2022). “The people who don’t know much about wine but are intrigued by it; the people who love the manga; and the connoisseurs, the oenophiles – and the two last categories are the guardians of the temple.”
Fans of the manga were ravenous not only for each instalment but its wines; as volumes flew off the shelves – more than 3.5 million copies have sold – so did bottles mentioned in the series, drastically altering availability and retail pricing for certain vintages.
The manga’s popularity can be partly credited to its approachability: Drops of God provided a new window into the world and vocabulary of wine. In his new series, Dang Tran hoped to not only replicate that accessibility, but further it with new character development.
Appellations, sulphites, bouquets, domaines, tannins, vintages, négociants, aerations – even the vocabulary of wine can be daunting to the casually curious.
While the manga helped educate millions of readers and dispelled some of the industry’s preconceptions, Dang Tran realised that most viewers would more likely be drawn to the plot and the contest at the outset.
“An adaptation is walking in a landmine, that’s for sure,” he says. “I know that.”
In his series, the drama unfolds around the inheritance left by one of the world’s most prolific wine authorities. His estranged daughter, Camille Léger (Fleur Geffrier), must compete against the wine titan’s protégé, Issei Tomine (Tomohisa Yamashita), for a home in Japan and one of the world’s most comprehensive wine collections.
Léger – in the show a French woman but in the manga a Japanese man – is a novice who must overcome her sometimes violent aversion to wine caused, in part, by intense childhood scent memory and training with her now-late father.
Tomine, meanwhile, proves methodical, encyclopedic, shrewd and unflinching, with the clear advantage of years of study.
Léger’s talent, however, is innate and as the series follows her immersion into wine and both protagonists sip, swirl and spit, viewers learn alongside them: how to taste wine, how it’s made, what’s at the heart of it.
Dang Tran began production with the benefit of a bit of wine knowledge simply by being French, he jokes, though he would need much more to bring the Kibayashis’ manga to life.
“I thought, ‘OK, if I am Camille and she knows nothing about wine, where would I start?’” he says. “My journey is her journey, or her journey is my journey. It was very demanding, but that’s the beauty of this work.”
He began reading tomes by American and French authors, including popular illustrated reference
I wanted … to show the way the wine is made, the people … making the wine – it’s agriculture
SÉBASTIEN PRADAL, SOMMELIER
book Le Vin C’est Pas
Sorcier (Wine is not Rocket Science) by Ophélie Neiman and the comprehensive Le Grand
Larousse du Vin (The Grand Larousse of Wine) by Isabelle Jeuge-Maynart.
To fit dozens of volumes of text into a miniseries, Dang Tran had to pare down the 12 wines that needed to be identified in the manga to only three.
“If you’ve read only one volume of the manga, you still know how dense and how didactic it was – which are two great qualities for manga, but not so much for a TV show,” he says.
Dang Tran designed the challenges, then found the wines that exemplified the characteristics that fit. To find these wines, he turned to the series’ consulting sommelier, Sébastien Pradal.
With nearly 30 years in food and wine, Pradal became not only a sounding board but a tasting coach for the actors and a connection to real-life vintners.
While the verbiage and establishing the inner workings of the wine industry were crucial to building a believable world to Pradal, most important to the sommelier was conveying the people behind the bottles: the vintners, the farmers and the families who care for the vines, sometimes for multiple generations.
“I wanted in fact to show the way the wine is made, the people who are making the wine – it’s agriculture,” Pradal says. “It’s a real job, the real world.”
As is oft repeated by both the show’s characters and its team, wine creates stories, heritage and memory – and a bottle that costs a month’s salary drunk alone is worth far less without the ties formed by sharing it.
“When you discover this world of wine, you understand how much it’s about tradition,” Dang Tran says. “It’s about good values, it’s about the sky, the earth and humans. It’s all about nature, really.”