What is the taste of pretentiousness?
What is the haughty?
What is the taste of eminence?
I have no idea, but watching Drops of God, I’m reminded I’m very much one of the poors.
The premise, you may ask, Shizuku Kanzaki, the son of a world-renowned oenologist (look it up), and Issei Tomine, his father’s talented and upstart protege. Together, they compete to identify thirteen legendary wines, known as the “Twelve Apostles“. The winner gets the greatest and most expensive wine collection in the world.
Like I said, it’s pretentious in its conveyance of the story.
The anime knows exactly what it is. It understands that wine culture is absurd. The pretension, the gatekeeping, the way grown men talk about “notes of elderflower” like they’re decoding the Dead Sea Scrolls. It leans into every supercilious convention and never once pretends it’s above the material.
That’s what makes it work.
But here’s the thing: beneath all that wine-snobbery nonsense lives an actual story. These characters have real stakes drenched in the fanciest of grape juice. In most anime, rivals would be slashing each other with giant swords, screaming about honor and destiny. In Drops of God, they’re battling over palate, terroir, and the ability to taste what ordinary people miss. A blade cuts through flesh. Wine cuts through the soul, and somehow, in this anime, that’s more brutal.
The show dabbles in wine history through compelling people who’ve devoted their lives to understanding it. Or in Shizuku Kanzaki’s case, not at all.
You meet masters and thieves, upstarts and legacy keepers. You watch them navigate the upper echelons of oenology not to prove their strength but to prove their refinement.
And the weird part?
It works.
The story is genuinely fascinating.
The characters are complex. The world has legs…not unlike a good Bordeaux.
So yes, it annoyed me. Wine culture is ridiculous. But Drops of God made me care anyway. It’s educational without feeling like a lecture. It’s character-driven. It’s weird and VERY specific.
That’s the real victory here.
Not the wine.
The storytelling.
The Drops of God debuts on Crunchyroll on April 10
