New Apple TV+ series Drops of God, about a contest of senses to win the fortune of the world’s most famous eccentric wine connoisseur, hits a roadblock this week. Issei considers quitting — and Camille isn’t 100% she’s ready to face him if he doesn’t.
Plus, Camille hatches an elaborate plot to get herself back on equal footing with Issei. And Issei’s plans to save face don’t go as planned. Entitled “Duel,” it’s a most exciting episode of this excitingly peculiar show.
Drops of God recap: ‘Duel’
Season 1, episode 3: After a dressing down from his family, Issei Tomine (played by Tomohisa Yamashita) is closing up his little firm. He had an idea that he might step up in the footsteps of his mentor, Alexandre Léger (Stanley Weber), and lend his services to the world of oenology, hiring himself out for millions as a consultant. But his family, which contains some very traditional Japanese businessmen, didn’t approve. So he’s locking up, with just five days to decide if he cares enough about his work to take part in Léger’s contest and betray his family’s wishes.
What contest is that? Well, it’s a game to win Léger’s millions — and his favor from beyond the grave. The great winemaker died a few weeks ago, and he was torn between leaving everything to Issei or to his estranged daughter, Camille Léger (Fleur Geffrier).
Alexandre hadn’t spoken to Camille in years. However, she recently learned that this was not his choice. Her mother (Cécile Bois) wrote to Alexandre, pretending to be Camille, and cut him out of her daughter’s life conclusively. Obviously, Camille had no idea about this subterfuge until after her father died. Learning to be a consummate wine expert, someone who can sniff out every single element and origin of any wine in seconds, has gotten her closer to her father than she ever was in her adult life.
The ultimate wine challenge
Before he died, Alexandre reached out to his old friend Philippe Chassangre (Gustave Kervern) and his son, Thomas (Tom Wozniczka), to train Camille’s senses again after so many years away from her dad and his training. She’s gotten over a lot of her trauma in a few short weeks, and she’s almost ready for the first challenge, which started when she sampled a glass of wine at her father’s lawyer’s office. Now she must identify it, to the brand and town.
There are three challenges, and Camille can’t really afford to lose any of them. By figuring out the stray elements in the wine by scent, she tracks down a rare wine by a vintner named André Gigon (Guy Moign). Thomas and Camille drive out to his property, aware that his bottles usually sell for 10,000 euros, hoping for the best.
André’s son, Mathieu (Norbert Ferrer), is only too happy to let them in, but he has bad news for them: He’s sold the last bottle, but he’s reasonably sure they were on the right track. They just can’t prove it. Thomas and Camille have a protracted goodbye, having grown rather fond of each other during her weeks of training, but they leave without having said anything definitive. Thomas isn’t single, and Camille’s distracted, but there’s something there.
Familial friction rubs Issei the wrong way
While Camille’s flying back to Tokyo, Issei decides to take matters into his own hands. He reaches out to a journalist named Yurika Katase (Azusa Okamoto) to announce he’s withdrawing from Alexandre’s contest to work at his family’s diamond concern. Yurika doesn’t take the news terribly well. She calls him a coward, and says he’s just afraid to lose to a foreign woman, the daughter of his mentor.
Meanwhile, Issei’s mother, Honoka Tomine (Makiko Watanabe), is taking flack from her father, Noboru (Masane Tsukayama), who owns their company. He wants Issei to get on the trolley, stop embarrassing himself with his wine career, and join the family business. Noboru’s livid, but thinks maybe the best way to catch this fly is with honey, so he advises Honoka to approach Issei softly.
Knowing she isn’t any good at that, she asks her husband, Hirokazu (Satoshi Nikaido), to step in and give it a shot. Issei likes his dad — because his dad is still human, unlike his too frequently robotic and pride-driven mother. Hirokazu hates doing it, but he can’t refuse his wife, so he tries. Issei sees right through him, of course, and gives him the full Rebel Without a Cause.
“You’re just a coward!” Issei snaps at his father as he walks away.
A plan to taste an incredible wine
Once Camille’s back in Tokyo, Alexandre’s friend Luca Inglese (Diego Ribon) has an idea for her. He actually has the bottle Camille is curious about in one of his restaurants in Osaka. The trouble is, yeah, he’s selling it for $12,000. But what if Camille could pose as a waiter and induce a very wealthy fellow named Mr. Matsubara (Mitsugu Yasuda), due for dinner that night, to order the wine?
That would get Camille close enough to the wine to at least smell it, and maybe … fortune permitting, taste it.
Dinner goes by, and Matsuda and his guest (Hiroaki Kakeno) drink the whole bottle, leaving but a drop for Camille to sample. Bad news, though: It’s not the right wine. Thomas might be even more upset about this news than Camille when he calls for a progress report. Fearing for her confidence, he flies to Tokyo to help. And, together with Luca’s in-house wine experts Miyabi Shinohara (Kyoko Takenaka) and Lorenzo (Luca Terracciano), they pull an all-nighter, trying every wine in Luca’s cellar.
A last-minute clue gets them close, but Camille’s still walking into the contest basically uncertain about her answer. She might need a miracle.
Who knew wine could prove some compelling?
Photo: Apple TV+
I’m all in on Drops of God now. The world of high-end wine is just too peculiar a subject for drama, even with its odd contours and culs-de-sac. The sequence of Miyabi and Lorenzo teaching Camille how to properly serve wine to rich people has a kind of mock-David Fincher/The Social Network charge to it.
So does Camille’s trip to the wine cellar in her mind to search for clues during the contest. It’s a funky but effective device, like something out of a Stephen King novel. The hesitant romance between Camille and Thomas has the charge of the real about it in an otherwise-heightened reality.
Drops of God is kind of a detective show, kind of an espionage show, kind of a corporate intrigue show. And all the way through, these disparate threads are held together by the bizarrely captivating study of the specifics of winemaking and the way wine ages and tastes. It’s very fine, very odd stuff. Not sure there’s anything else like this manga-inspired show on TV right this second.
★★★★☆
Watch Drops of God on Apple TV+
New episodes of Drops of God arrive Fridays on Apple TV+.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper and But God Made Him A Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
