Drops of God Review: The Wine Manga Where a Beer Salesman Has to Out-Taste a Prodigy to Inherit His Father's Cellar

I don't drink. I never really got into it. So when a friend pushed a manga about wine into my hands, I almost laughed — me, the kid who spent lunch breaks alone with a book, reading about middle-aged men swirling glasses of Bordeaux? But I opened volume 1 anyway, and within a few chapters a character took one sip of wine and saw a rock concert — guitars, lights, a singer with his fist in the air. I'd never read anything that described a taste like that. I kept going. I'm still not a wine drinker. But Drops of God made me feel, for a few hundred pages, like I understood why someone would build a whole life around it.

Quick Take

• A wine-tasting manga that turns flavor into pure imagination — every glass becomes a vision, a memory, a piece of music
• Built around a real competition: an estranged son who hates wine versus an adopted prodigy who's devoted his life to it, both racing to identify wines from a dead man's riddles
• 44 volumes, complete and available in English from Kodansha. Age rating: T (Teen) — it's all about alcohol, but the tone is educational, not indulgent

Story Overview

Yutaka Kanzaki is one of the most famous wine critics in the world. When he dies, his will is read — and it's a challenge, not a bequest. His enormous, priceless wine collection will go to whoever can correctly identify thirteen wines he describes only through poetic riddles: twelve he calls the "Twelve Apostles," and one final wine he names the "Drops of God."

There are two candidates. The first is his biological son, Shizuku Kanzaki, who works in sales at Taiyo Beer and who resented his father so much that he refused to learn anything about wine at all. The second is Issei Tomine, a brilliant young wine critic whom Yutaka adopted and groomed as a kind of spiritual heir. Shizuku starts the race knowing almost nothing. Tomine starts it already a professional.

What unfolds across 44 volumes is essentially a globe-spanning scavenger hunt. Each Apostle sends the rivals chasing a single wine through a different region and style — Bordeaux, Burgundy, the Rhône, Italy, Spain, California — decoding Yutaka's clues one bottle at a time. As Shizuku learns wine in real time, the contest doubles as a slow reckoning with the father he never understood, and the prize gradually matters less than what each wine reveals about the man who chose it.

Characters

Shizuku Kanzaki — The protagonist, a junior salesman at a beer company who grew up hating his father's obsession. His "weapon" is that he has an extraordinarily sensitive palate and sense of smell — something his upbringing trained into him whether he wanted it or not. His arc is learning wine from zero, which is the whole engine of the book: the reader learns alongside him because he genuinely has everything to discover.

Issei Tomine — The adopted rival and a celebrated young wine critic. He's not a cartoon villain; he's a real expert with his own complicated bond to Yutaka, and that bond is part of what he's fighting for. He knows the wines technically better than Shizuku, which keeps the competition genuinely uncertain.

Miyabi Shinohara — A sommelier-in-training who becomes Shizuku's partner through the contest, supplying the technical grounding he lacks and growing close to him over the course of the series.

Yutaka Kanzaki — The dead father whose will sets everything in motion. He never appears alive in the present, but the entire story is built around reconstructing who he was through the wines he loved.

What I Love About It

The single thing that hooked me — and that I think is the manga's real invention — is how it draws the taste of wine. When Shizuku takes that first sip of a 2001 Château Mont-Pérat, the panel doesn't show a tasting note. It shows a psychedelic rock concert: soaring guitars, crashing cymbals, a Freddie Mercury figure with his fist raised. The "powerful" body of the wine, the melting sweetness, the sharp rush of acidity — all of it gets translated into music and stage lights. I'd never seen a comic try to render flavor as a full-page experience like that, and it completely reframed what the book was doing for me.

What makes it work is that the imagery isn't random decoration. Other characters do the same thing in their own register — one woman compares a wine to a famous painting, "dignified, yet layered with the familiarity of workaday life." The manga is arguing, page after page, that tasting is an act of imagination, not just chemistry. As someone who doesn't drink, I never felt locked out, because the book isn't really teaching you to taste — it's teaching you to picture. That's a thing comics can do that a wine textbook never could, and Drops of God leans on it harder and more inventively than anything else I've read in the food-manga space.

Memorable Scene ⚠️ Spoiler Warning

That Château Mont-Pérat tasting in the early volumes is the scene that sells the entire series, and it's worth describing because of what wine it is. Shizuku, the supposed amateur, identifies a relatively affordable, then-obscure Bordeaux — and his vision of it as a Queen concert is so vivid and so confident that it announces him as a real contender against Tomine. The brilliance is that it's not a legendary first-growth; it's a modest bottle elevated by how Shizuku experiences it. The whole thesis of the manga — that wine is about perception and feeling, not just price tags and pedigree — lands in that one full-page burst of rock-concert imagery. It's also the scene that, in real life, sent people running to buy actual Mont-Pérat off shelves.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• The visual translation of taste into imagery is genuinely original and the best reason to read it
• The father-son mystery gives the wine education real emotional stakes
• A complete 44-volume work, fully available in English
• You don't need to drink — or even like wine — to be pulled in

Cons

• 44 volumes is a serious commitment
• The structure (a new wine riddle each arc) can feel repetitive over the long haul
• If you have zero curiosity about wine, the connoisseurship may wear thin — this one won't work for everyone

Is Drops of God Worth Reading?

Yes — especially if you like food and competition manga and want something aimed at adults. It takes a subject that sounds dry on paper and makes it sing, literally, by turning every glass into a vision. The father-son inheritance race keeps the pages turning, and the fact that it's complete in English means you can actually finish the journey. The main caveat is length and the repeating riddle-of-the-arc rhythm; if that doesn't bother you, this is one of the most distinctive food manga ever made.

Real-World Impact

This is one of the rare manga whose influence spilled into the actual market. In Japan, wines were literally advertised as "as seen in The Drops of God," and bottles featured in the manga saw real sales spikes — the early Château Mont-Pérat episode is credited with importers selling out stock in days. The effect reached overseas, too: California's Broc Cellars reportedly saw its Japanese customer base surge after being featured, to the point where much of one wine's production now heads to Japan. It's a genuine case of a comic moving a global market.

Similar Manga

Title	Its Approach	How Drops of God Differs
Oishinbo	Long-running food manga that teaches cuisine through journalism and rivalry	Narrows the focus to wine and renders taste as surreal visual imagery
Bartender	Quiet, episodic series about a master mixologist and his customers	Trades calm vignettes for a high-stakes, multi-volume inheritance competition
Food Wars!	Competitive cooking with over-the-top, fantastical reaction panels	Aims at adult connoisseurship rather than shonen tournament energy

Where to Buy

Read the first volume. If it doesn't hook you, put it down. It'll hook you.

Start with Volume 1 →

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