Is Drops of God Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

Drops of God starts with a death and a dare. Yutaka Kanzaki, Japan's most famous wine critic, dies and leaves his massive collection to whichever of his two heirs can first identify twelve legendary wines — the "Twelve Apostles" — and then name the single greatest wine of all, the "Drops of God" itself. One heir is Shizuku Kanzaki, his biological son, who grew up resenting his father's obsession and knows almost nothing about wine. The other is Issei Tomine, his father's adopted protégé, already a celebrated critic in his own right. What follows is 44 volumes of tasting, arguing, and travelling the world's wine regions, written by the sibling duo working under the pen name Tadashi Agi and drawn by Shu Okimoto.

What it does well

The smartest thing this manga does is turn a subject that's mostly about smell and taste into an actual plot. The inheritance contest gives every tasting scene stakes — it's not just "is this wine good," it's "did Shizuku just identify an Apostle, and what does that mean for who wins the estate." That structure holds the whole series together and makes even a quiet scene of someone swirling a glass feel like it's building to something.

The series' other trick is visual: when a character tastes something extraordinary, the panels break into huge, often strange imagery — a wine might be drawn as a thunderstorm, a forest fire, or a half-remembered afternoon from childhood. It sounds like it shouldn't work on a static page, but it's the manga's way of putting a sensory experience into pictures, and it's genuinely inventive. Shizuku and Issei also make a strong pair of leads precisely because they approach wine so differently — Issei through training and encyclopedic knowledge, Shizuku through raw instinct he doesn't fully trust yet — and the manga is careful not to make either approach the obviously “correct” one.

Where it falls short

The format repeats a lot. A wine gets poured, the cast debates its qualities, somebody has a vision, and the chapter ends on whether they guessed right. That rhythm is compelling for a long stretch, but by the later volumes of a 44-volume series it starts to feel like a formula running on inertia rather than genuine escalation. The world outside the two leads thins out, too — most of the wine-industry side characters exist to be impressed by Shizuku or Issei rather than to carry their own arcs.

It's also simply a long commitment for a premise that is, underneath the travel and the imagery, one contest stretched across a decade of serialization. If you're not hooked by the first several volumes, the later volumes aren't going to pivot into something different enough to win you over.

Verdict

A manga built around sniffing wine glasses has no right to be this readable, but the inheritance contest and the way it renders taste as spectacle make Drops of God one of the better “expertise as drama” manga out there — just go in knowing it's a long pour, not a quick glass.