The series “Drops of God” is back for another installment, this time with what feels like even higher production value and most importantly, correct wine information overall.
Season 1 focused on the blind tasting competition set up by wine critic Alexandre Léger for his daughter, Camille Léger and illegitimate son, Issei Tomine. Now that we know they’re siblings, a new quest arrives in the form of a mysterious bottle that Alexandre wasn’t able to identify during his lifetime.
Well, the dynamic half-sibling duo makes short work of that, zipping off to various locations in Europe and ultimately arriving to Georgia where they figure out what the wine is, in what seems to be 1-2 days. Suck it, dad!
With this feat accomplished, the series basically has no point and literally gets stuck in Georgia. Camille inserts herself into a family squabble and Issei seeks to cure himself of his fear of the dark due fears from freediving due to childhood trauma that plays out later in the series.
The strengths of the series are that it looks fantastic, you get to see the full, remodeled interior of Châteauneuf-du-Pape’s Beaucastel in all its glory, nice scenes of Georgia, even if not fully geographically correct, and a supporting cast that, much like the first season does a great deal to carry the series.
The core problem continues to be the two leads of, Fleur Geffrier and Tomohisa Yamashita. They were weak in the first season, but here as they’ve supposedly developed as people in the intervening years, the lack of depth in the acting is just painful. Yamashita, trying to transmit all his internal pain generally comes across as either constipated, stupid, or perhaps both. Geffrier, even at her best just seems like a ding dong who is impossible to take seriously. On some level I’m curious to see either of them in other roles to know if it’s just this series and its direction or their abilities which cause the problems.
Also at stake is that so much of the dialog is horribly on-the-nose. The script has zero polish to it and far too much is said than shown as again, wine inherently boring on screen. One of the few good lines was early on when monks in Georgia won’t talk to them and their Georgian driver says, “They’re monks. And they’re Georgians.” Such fine snippets of dialog are however not otherwise to be found in any form of abundance.
From episode five onwards (there are eight in total) I had to watch it at 1.5x speed just to get through it and even then, it was slow.
So ultimately, does it match up to the first series? Only in that it’s not really that much fun to watch, but the first series was still a great deal livelier and at least had better source material to work with. The only plus side is that there seems to be some finality at the end of this series so there won’t be a Season 3, although Season 1 seemed to end the same way…
★★☆☆☆
