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.
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Featured photo : © Apple TV+
