To be transparent up front: I love wine. I drink whisk(e)y more these days but wine has always been a passion. I’m no expert by any wild stretch, but I know more than the average person. I was a wine broker for a little while back in the States. So I am very much the target audience for The Drops of God. I don’t know whether that makes me a captive audience or a tougher one, but it’s a fact. Wine so rarely overlaps with manga and anime that when it does happen, it represents a kind of geekdom perfect storm for me.
Kami no Shizuku is, by any measure, an iconic seinen manga. It ran from 2004-2014, for a total of 44 volumes. It’s never received an anime until now but has gotten three (one Korean, one Japanese, and one multi-national) live-action adaptations (along with a game and music album). The mangaka team has received several awards from the French government. And given that France is a country that loves not only wine but manga, that’s no small compliment. Suffice to say those who make their living off wine consider it an authoritative take on that world.
One might be tempted to ask “why now?” on the anime front, but the last few years render that question moot. Length is a serious concern, though. Can you tell a 44-volume story in 24 episodes? Not without some serious cuts, obviously. But the 2023 drama told the story in sixteen hour-long eps and managed a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, so who am I to say it can’t be done. Even at that, though, the anime will have to make do with little over half the time, and Satelight is not a production company known for top-tier quality these days.
Somehow, despite the colliding worlds of my obsessions, I’ve managed never to directly drink in Kami no Shizuku before now. So I go in fresh. My initial response is, I found the premiere thoroughly captivating despite what I would call pedestrian production values. I would advise anyone genuinely interested in this series to avoid relying on anime aggregator sites and discussion forums for feedback – The Drops of God is too far outside the strike zone of traditional anime to have much of a chance. Director Itoso Kenji also did Aquarion: Myth of Emotions, a show most fans hated but I quite liked. And he adds a few nice flourishes here, though nothing I would call flashy.
No, this story is going to have to carry the day on its own merits. The gist of it is that a famous wine critic named Kazaki Yutaka (non-wine people have no idea how ludicrously powerful the top wine critics are) has passed away. He’s effectively set up a contest for his collection, valued at 12 billion Yen, between his son Shizuku (who works for a beer company) and Toumine Issei, a young critic the old man adopted (in Japan this is often done with adults) a week before his death. The relationship between Yutaka and Shizuku is puzzling and seemingly contradictory. The son obviously loved the father, but never tried a drop of wine in his life. Shizuku says his father never taught him anything about wine, but he did obsessively train his sense of smell.
If you know tasting at all, you know that by far the most important element to train is the nose, not the tongue. I was never a sommelier but I did attain the coffee version (that industry is where I spent most of my career in the U.S.), a Q-Grader. When Shizuku’s “master” Shinohara Miyabi brought out that smell kit it immediately hit home, because I lived with one of those damn things for weeks when I was training for the Q-Grader exams (which last a week and thoroughly kicked my ass). Whatever your specialty – wine, coffee, whisky – there’s huge overlap in the training and skill set for professional grading. That’s why Shizuku showing off his nose with the coffee was another moment that totally hit home with me.
The contest is basically who can identify the old man’s “twelve apostles” of wine. He even sets up a battle to determine who gets to live at the estate, based on describing a specific secret bottle. Toumine seems like the obvious villain here but I don’t vibe that he’s a simple money-grubbing charlatan. I also sense that the father secretly wanted his biological son to win and the lack of “wine” education was some sort of long con, but we’ll see. Shizuku obviously has the senses for this, he just lacks the knowledge. That’s where Miyabi comes in – she may be a lowly apprentice sommelier herself but she and Shizuku have bonded over wine (and maybe more).
Unfortunately Miyabi, in the course of trying to train Shizuku to help identity that secret bottle, has broken a rare bottle from the near-deified Burgundian winemaker Henri Jayer (one of whose bottles was the last wine Yutaka chose to drink). That leaves her screwed and fired – along with her boss – and Shizuku declares that he’ll find a bottle worthy of replacing it (a near-impossibility given that only 700 were ever produced). That’s the first “arc”, it seems, with the larger story focusing on those twelve apostles.
The premise is a bit silly in a Squid Game sort of way, but as a wine guy I’m already bought in. This premiere isn’t perfect by any means but for me it does what it needs to do – the question is going to be the matter of pacing. I am encouraged that one of my absolute favorite seiyuu, Fuji Shinshuu, has been cast as Miyabi’s master (which makes him Shizuku’s grandmaster?) Fujieda Shirou. His role seems to be to remind Shizuku that wine isn’t an academic curiosity but a lovingly-created expression of the glory that man’s genius can create from nature, and should be appreciated and enjoyed – not just studied. The more we see of him – and that perspective – the better The Drops of God is going to work for me.
