DROPS OF GOD is the TV Show the Wine World Should Embrace

Stop hating on "The Bear". We already have our own show and we should maybe stop ignoring it.

I'm writing this in response to a recent episode of The VinePair Podcast, specifically the July 25th episode titled "It's OK if 'The Bear' Doesn't Care About Wine."

Now, I fully agree with VinePair's trio of hosts regarding the core topic of the episode, which is excellently argued and everyone should listen to it posthaste. TL;DL(isten) - they discus how the wine industry gets upset when wine isn't portrayed at all, and also when it's portrayed in a way they deem "incorrect".

But in passing, the following was said:

Zach - "And it's interesting because I was thinking of this in juxtaposition to the Apple TV show, 'Drops of God', which was an adaptation of a Japanese manga. And I watched like one episode of it, and personally found it unbearable. Because it's like the opposite, right?

Adam - I did, too. (laughs)

Zach - It's how a certain set of wine folks want to see wine portrayed, right? It's like everyone is obsessed and it's just...it is the central character of the show in a lot of ways. And to me it exemplifies why - what Adam was saying at the beginning - why wine on screen just doesn't translate, because in the end it's really hard to hear people talk about the special qualities of wine, the sensory qualities of wine, and just hear them talk about it, it's just inherently...it's why I think we don't do that on this podcast...we don't all pull out our favorite bottle of Bordeaux and taste it together and talk about the tasting notes."

Now, first off, I actually agree that most people are not particularly interested or engaged by “wine talk”. I certainly wasn’t when I was a casual drinker. The tasting notes, the sensory descriptions, the floridly poetical riffs on how a bottle of overpriced grape juice strikes the palate of someone who's drunk way too much of the stuff.

But I think Drops of God exemplifies how something as niche and specific as wine DOES translate on screen, when handled the way this show handles it.

This is my gauntlet thrown to all podcasters, writers, and professionals in the wine field. Drops of God is the show you should embrace and talk about at length and suggest to customers both new and old. And this is why.

Just The Facts

Let’s start with things we can quote!

Drops of God has a spit-take ONE-HUNDRED PERCENT critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes. This is from 26 reviews, which is not a crazy large sample, but neither is it particularly small. And it’s notable that most reviews are from non-wine, non-food related organizations. NPR, New York Magazine, Chicago Tribune, Financial Times, Decider, Newsday, IndieWire, Screenhub, etc. And not one single “rotten” review. For a show that supposedly exemplifies everything about wine that people are turned off by.

Even the rare review from a food site, by Amy McCarthy at EATER, had this to say:

I am a wine idiot. I truly could not tell you the difference between wines beyond being able to identify that some are red and some are white. Which is why I’m thrilled that I’m not Camille Leger (played by Fleur Geffrier), the protagonist of Apple TV+’s new series Drops of God, who’s tasked with identifying a single bottle of wine’s origin and vintage in order to inherit her estranged father’s multimillion-dollar wine collection.

While the subject of wine expertise does not seem, on its face, an especially compelling topic, Drops of God deftly weaves long-suppressed family dysfunction, childhood trauma, and the nuances of oenology into a series that’s worth watching, even if you don’t know a thing about wine.

In watching just the first two episodes, I feel like I’m getting set up for an actual wine education, one that’s far more likely to teach me a thing or two about varietals and vintages than listening to an overly excited sommelier try to explain tasting notes in the middle of a restaurant dinner. (This is no knock at sommeliers; I am impossible to teach.)

And then there’s the 93% score from 250+ viewer reviews (compare this to The Bear’s Season Three 53% score!), nearly all of them casual drinkers or non-drinkers.

First Image: Critic Review Sample; Images 2-4: User Review Samples

Over on a Reddit thread, one user wrote:

So I'm not a wine person, never was. Then I saw the show and for some reason I can't explain it created an "itch" to understand wine better. Now I'm trying different wines and looking into taking the WSET classes. I guess you could say, I like the show. Did feel like the wrap-up was a little rushed.

Over on IndieWire the headline reads: “'Drops of God' Is a Great 'Succession' Hangover Cure”.

Succession. Pachinko. Queen’s Gambit.

These are all melodramatic shows about niche topics with high stakes that general audiences love. Many want to try their hand at digging deeper into said niche skillsets on display. If you’re going to create a captivating drama, there needs to be dramatic stakes, which means you’re going to have to play up some of the negative aspects of the thing. What DoG does that’s so admirable, is they play these aspects up in a way that’s actually attractive. At least according to all the above quotes and screenshots.

As usual, it's us, the wine voices and industry leaders, who are missing from the shows viewership. We each may have our reasons to dismiss or reject the show, the point being that we always seem to be able to come up with such. The VinePair crew pointed out that we complain at the lack of representation, then complain at what kind of representation. And we’re doing the same again, here, by misreading how DoG plays to the average viewer. We’re saying the kind of representation of wine is, once again, “incorrect”, if in a different way.

But let’s look at what this show and story actually IS.

It’s Wonderfully, Knowingly Absurd

Drops of God is based on a long-running manga of the same name that ran 44 volumes (!) and was a best-seller the entire run.

For those who aren’t that familiar with manga/anime style of storytelling, here’s an excellent one-paragraph summation in direct reference to Drops of God from fellow Substacker

Matthew Brady

of

Warren Peace - Reviewing Comics, Film, TV, and More!

It's pretty impressive how well manga series are able to take seemingly mundane activities and transform them into emotional, revelatory experiences for characters, and not just in an amusingly exaggerated manner either. This sort of thing occurs all across the spectrum of subject matter, from sports to cooking to most any corner of the human experience (and beyond, expanding to include fictional pursuits like monster collecting or rocket skating), prompting scene after scene of one character explaining the intricacies of, say, internal medicine to a novice, who exclaims excitedly about how they never realized how amazing the subject of note could be, but while it might be something of a cliche, it rarely gets old. No, when done well (which is more often than not, at least based on what has managed to cross the Pacific), these scenes manage to believably convey passion, not just from the experienced person who wishes to pass on their knowledge, but also the novice who is beginning to see a whole new world open up before them. There's something about the earnestness on display and the participants' exaggerated reactions (which can vary from a surprised interest to a full-on freakout, depending on the tone of the series) that sucks the reader right in, not only entertaining them with formula-disguising stories, but often also educating them and getting them as interested in the subject as the characters. It's quite the feat, especially considering how often it is replicated.

Warren Peace Classic: The Drops of God, Volume 1

I also heartily recommend reading this other reviewer’s take on the show, which makes me so happy:

Red Wine Supernova

Manga (and this show based ona manga) is by nature absurd, while also showcasing a sincere love for the topic. Not love for the prestige or snobbery side of it, but for the thing itself.

The manga Drops of God was created by brother/sister sibling team, Yuko and Shin Kibayashi, writing together under the pen name "Tadashi Agi", and art by Shu Okimoto.

Neither of the siblings have professional wine qualifications, but they grew up learning about French food and wine from their grandfather and drank wine every day as a hobby.

Whenever the siblings drank wine, they played a game of describing the "image" of the wine, and realized they shared "similar imagery without much diversion of vision from each other".

Wanting to share their visions with other people, Shin suggested creating a manga centered around wine. When deciding which wines to feature in the manga, they researched and consulted with wine experts, and every wine that appears in the manga the siblings tasted themselves. They tasted various kinds of wine at all price ranges and from different parts of the world. They ultimately excluded wines they thought readers would be disappointed in, regardless of price.

Now if you've never read a manga or watched an anime before, the style of these mediums is…EXTRA. It's over-the-top, it's sensational, it's histrionic, no matter the subject matter. It's the core part of its charm.

Within the first chapter of the manga, we're given our first moment of a character being "transported" by smelling or tasting a wine:

I read the manga in preparation for watching the TV show, and when I hit these pages I rolled my eyes so hard I thought I'd gone temporarily blind.

Then I remembered that this was manga. I’d never had this reaction to any other over-the-top moment in any other manga. In fact, I was usually gleeful, rolling in my own inner child filth at such moments. So why was I feeling this way about a manga focused on wine?

Which is my way of saying: I totally get it.

We're hard-wired to reject overbearing wine talk and pretentiousness. We walk around with a sort of wine trauma, ready to tackle the first person to say a single word in a patronizing tone of voice. But this isn't what's happening in DoG. At least, it doesn't have anything to do with the subject matter being wine.

This is just full-tilt, wild expressionistic FUN with a topic that's rarely fun. Wine professionals throw their hands up in despair when trying to make it fun. But here it is. On a silver platter. Or in a freshly opened bottle, as it were.

The TV Show

The show makes a number of significant changes to the manga, mostly for the better.

It switches out one of the two male leads for a woman, and switches this character's nationality to France, so now we can have a France vs. Japan showdown plus better gender politics. In the manga, you had two male leads with a bevvy of female assistants and supporters (who were usually the ones “learning” from the of course exceptionally talented and/or knowledgeable men.)

Some of the more manic and whimsical manga-esque elements are toned down so that real actors can portray real characters that come across as real people. But the show does keep the most integral part: characters being visibly "transported" by smelling or sipping wine!

The show usually has characters transported to childhood memories, though occassionally will go as overboard as the manga by having them see a period in ancient history, a painting, a mountain, silly wonderful shit like that.

Yes, it's absurd and over the top. Yes, the show is not shy in spotlighting the most pretentious and stuffy and overly-formal elements that exist within the wine world. But always in the most entertaining way possible.

The themes / messages of the show are also things we can heartily embrace. Avoiding all spoilers, I can say that the show falls firmly on the side of enjoying wine for the sake of enjoying oneself. That living for the prestige and pretentions of wine culture lead to obsession, unhappiness, unhealth, loneliness, a dragon that must be forever chased until you realize you have a cellar worth millions and literally nothing else.

True fulfillment comes with family, friends, community, the making of wine and the drinking of wine, the appreciation of all it can be but never allowing the industry nor the product itself to overtake the importance of human relationships.

The show acknowledges and showcases ALL the facets of the wine world as it currently exists. Pretention absolutely exists. Money and obsession absolutely exist. Excess exists. But also joy. And appreciation. And the bonds that can often form between people who fall down this rabbit hole together.

The common viewer and casual drinker who have seen the show are tickled pink by it. They love the drama, the ability to make learning about wine a high-stakes game. Some want to learn more post-show. Some just walk away having had great fun with a subject they never had great fun with before.

Dear Zach, Adam, and Joanna over at VinePair; dear wine Substackers; dear wine writers and professionals who stumble across this article: go give Drops of God a proper watch. It’s only 8 episodes long. It’s done in one Season. (It’s really a mini-series.)

Unclench. Pour a glass of whatever you’re in the mood for.

And have fun.