is a Japanese manga series written by Tadashi Agi, a pseudonym employed by creative team of sister and brother Yuko and Shin Kibayashi, and illustrated by Shu Okimoto. The story, about wine, is told in two parts – the first part focusing on protagonist Shizuku Kanzaki and his rival Issei Tomine on their search of the "Twelve Apostles" wines, and the second focusing on finding the "Drops of God". A third part of the series, serving as a short sequel, details Shizuku's life after the competition and taking Issei's daughter under his wing.
The series was serialized in Kodansha's manga magazine Weekly Morning in Japan from November 2004 to June 2014. A sequel manga series, titled was serialized from May 2015 to October 2020. The story continues where the original manga left off, focusing on Shizuku traveling abroad to deepen his knowledge of wine and his search for the "Drops of God", with the theme being the "marriage" between wine and food, exploring the many different combinations between them.
On September 13, 2023, another sequel was announced, titled and was serialized in Weekly Morning from September 2023 to April 2024. The story takes place after Mariage, with an older Shizuku traveling the world and arriving in Paris to teach Issei's daughter about wine.
Drops of God is widely successful and received praise for its accurate knowledge of wines, characters, story, art, and is famous for its global impact on the wine market, especially the sales of wines profiled in the manga. The series also inspired two live-action television adaptations. An anime television series adaptation produced by Satelight aired from April to September 2026.
Plot Shizuku Kanzaki is a junior employee in a Japanese beverages company, Taiyo ("Sun" in Japanese) Beer mainly focusing on selling beers. As the story opens, he receives news that his father, from whom he is estranged, has died. His father was the world-renowned wine critic Yutaka Kanzaki, who owned a vast and famous wine collection. Summoned to the family home, a splendid European style mansion, to hear the reading of his father's will, Shizuku learns that, in order to take ownership of his legacy, he must correctly identify, and describe in the manner of his late father, thirteen wines, the first twelve known as the "Twelve Apostles" and the thirteenth known as the "Drops of God" ("Kami no Shizuku" in the original Japanese edition and "Les Gouttes de Dieu" in the French translation), that his father has described in his will. He also learns that he has a competitor in this, a renowned young wine critic called Issei Tomine, who his father has apparently recently adopted as his other son.
Shizuku has never drunk wine, in part a reaction against the ruling passion of his late father, nor had any previous knowledge about wines. However, with strong senses of taste and smell, and an uncanny ability to describe his experiences from those senses, Shizuku submerges himself in the world of wine and tries to solve the mysteries of the 13 wines and defeat Issei. In this, he is also helped by knowledge gained from his time as a child with his father, and supported by his friends, including trainee sommelier Miyabi Shinohara and colleagues in the newly formed wine department of his company, which he now joins.
Following a draw on the "Apostles" wines, Shizuku and Issei received a near year-long grace period before the search for the "Drops of God" resumed. They are tasked by The Order of the Drops of God, a social club created by Yutaka and seven of his closest friends and fellow wine experts, to overcome each of their respective challenges to gain the seven pages of describing the "Drops of God" in Yukata's will. Aiding Shizuku in his competition are the family that operates the Western-style Izakaya Mama-Miya and other chefs, where Shizuku find temporary employment to study wine and food pairing.
Production Development All the wines that appear in the comic are authentic, with authors Yuko and Shin Kibayashi being passionate wine lovers, even owning a 3,000-bottle collection. Despite neither author having professional wine qualifications, they grew up learning about French food and wine from their grandfather and drank wine every day as a hobby. One day, the siblings tried a 1985 DRC Échezeaux and become more entranced in the deeper aspects of the wine world, stating "when [they] had it, it made us think about the culture, the people, and we started to see these complex pictures and patterns like a rug. It made us see these illusions."
Whenever the siblings drank wine, they played a game of describing the "image" of wine, much like how characters in manga tend to do, and realized they shared "similar imagery without much diversion of vision from each other". Wanting to share their visions with other people, Shin suggested creating a manga centered around wine. When deciding which wine to feature in the manga, they researched and consulted with wine experts, and every wine that appeared in manga the siblings tasted. Based on a certain standard, they tasted various kinds of wine at all price ranges and from different parts of the world, even ones that don't appear in the manga. They excluded wines they thought readers would be disappointed in, regardless of price, or wines they personally found "unattractive", though they made sure no negative thoughts about wines were shown in the manga.
For the sequel series, the siblings became more interested in food pairing after introduced the pairing of oysters and Chablis wine in The Drops of God. In the depiction of Drops of God: Mariage, they wanted to emphasize how food and wine were intrinsic with each other, as there "are combinations that complement each other and that work against each other". To find an exquisite food pairing, they choose to spend time in their kitchen and at restaurants trying out different ingredients from Japanese, Chinese, and Western cuisines in order to find out what pairs best with wine.
Theme As frequently shown in the manga, the theme of the manga centered around the deep complexity of wine and the "story" behind it, and how wine "mirrors a country's food culture and lifestyle." According to the authors, they stated that wine is the "main character" of the story, instead of the protagonists Shizuku and Issei.
In the series, the word "tenchijin" is used, which refers to the "elements that create wine: heaven/vintage, earth/terroir and man." A Japanese winemaker, Koji Nakata, used this on his wine label and was one of the inspirations for the sibling writers as they realized that "every amazing wine has these essences. It needs good terroir, vintage, and more than anything, a good winemaker... None of these essences can be absent to create a good wine. Even if one of them overpowers the other, it'll offset the balance. It's not simply an industrial product. When a person receives the gift from heaven and the earth, he can create wine. In the back of our mind, we always wanted to convey how amazing that is."
Characters
A young employee in Taiyo Beer beverages company, and the legitimate son of Yutaka Kanzaki and his late wife (who died when Shizuku was six). His father gave him an elite education about wine when he was still a child, though he didn't realize it until reaching adulthood. However, he started rebelling against his father in his teens, resenting his father's obsession over it, and finally drove him to join a beer company. Incidentally, he was transferred to the wine department in the company and started to undertake the task of finding the "Drops of God". His sense of taste and smell is extremely sensitive, so much so that he could discern the components of an unopened bottle of wine. He also inherited the superb intuition and verbal expressiveness about wine from his father. On the other hand, his knowledge about wine is amateur-level, but has been growing since he started working in the wine department and meeting various wine experts and lovers throughout his journey. He also travelled around the world with his father during childhood, giving gave a him broad experiences, being well-immersed in arts and culture of the world. The first wine he had ever tasted was Château Mont-Pérat. Shizuku believes drinking is an essential part in understanding a wine, and comes to see wine drinking as a fun experience under any circumstance. He is simple-minded and optimistic, radiating a charming and warm personality that allows him to easily befriend anyone he meets and is helpful towards those in need. His concentration when pursuing goals and handsome appearance have attracted many women, but his insensitivity to romantic cues meant such feelings are normally unnoticed and unreciprocated.
A sommelier apprentice working in a French restaurant, she is very knowledgeable in all matters related to wine and has shown some talents in wine tasting. However, due to bad luck and a possible lack of intuition, she has failed to pass the Sommelier qualification exam several times. She was subsequently contracted by Taiyo Beer to work as a consultant for its wine department and eventually earned her sommelier license during Shizuku's year-long traveling. She has been supporting Shizuku with her knowledge about wine, but Shizuku often mocks her to be too bookish about wine, though her skills improves as time passes. She almost always appears together with Shizuku, and harbors romantic feelings towards him, often expressing jealously over other women Shizuku spends time with. In the story, a running gag depicts Miyabi as having the habit of bringing a male friend to her apartment to drink wine, and almost always ending up drunk and waken up realizing she has undressed herself to her panties while drunk.
Shizuki's father and was one of the leading wine collectors in the world, with his entire collection said to be worth around 2 billion yen at the current market price. At age 67, he died of pancreatic cancer before the beginning of the story and left a will that initiated the "Drops of God" search, with the underlying purpose of providing guidance to his two heirs, Shizuku and Issei. Yutaka was a globally renowned wine critic on par with Robert Parker and his writings used to influence the market price of various wines. In his younger days, Yutaka made a fortune through wine futures trading and has forged numerous connections throughout his lifetime, many of which Shizuku would become acquainted with during his journey. Although enigmatic and deeply dedicated to his passion for wine, Yukata was ultimately a loving father to Shizuku, though he dislikes how Yukata put him through many strict, unique training methods in his youth and resented how Yukata seems to put wine over him and his late mother. During Issei's childhood, Yukata kept his distance from his older son, only checking in on him a few times, but eventually regretted this decision, thus including him in his will and legally adopted him one week before his death.
Young and charismatic, he is a renowned wine critic and became the adopted son of Yutaka shortly before his death, and set his eyes on Yutaka's huge wine collections. Shizuku and Issei are the two beneficiaries listed in Yutaka's will, subsequently he became the main rival of Shizuku in the search of "Drops of God". Issei is in fact the illegitimate son of Yutaka and Honoka, thus Shizuku's half-brother - a fact Issei is aware of and seek to surpass Yukata's legacy, though only a few people (not even Shizuku and Sarah) know this secret.