Drops of God, winner of the 2024 International Emmy for Best Drama Series, defies expectations with its deeply emotional, character-driven story set in the world of fine wine.Season two premieres Wednesday, January 21, 2026, exclusively on Apple TV+, with new episodes released weekly.The show’s second season continues the story of Camille Léger and Issei Tomine as they pursue a mysterious bottle that tests their understanding of wine, legacy, and connection.
Drops of God, the winner of the 2024 International Emmy for Best Drama Series, is one of the more unlikely hits of recent years for a number of reasons. First, it’s about wine. Second, it’s based on a bizarrely popular Japanese manga first published in 2004. And third, well, it’s about wine.
Of course, I love wine; as the wine editor for Food & Wine, it’s sort of a job requirement. But historically, movies or shows about it often fall somewhere between yawn-inducing and deeply moronic (Sideways excepted). They also almost always include bone-headed factual mistakes that make anyone who knows anything at all about wine chortle in disbelief. No surprise audiences might be a little skeptical.
Drops of God is, instead, smart, affecting, and almost always spot-on in its portrayal of its subject — though, in truth, its subject really isn’t so much wine itself as it is the story of its two central characters, Camille Léger and Issei Tomine, told through wine.
In the first season, which was a breakout success and a thrill to watch, the two of them competed for the estate of Camille’s estranged father, the legendary wine critic and entirely pain-in-the-ass human being Alexandre Léger (the prize: an 87,000-bottle cellar worth $150 million); the field of combat, so to speak, was a series of tests of their wine knowledge and tasting ability. That might sound like a questionable premise for a show — sipping and spitting do not make for good TV — but the human drama between the two, the quality of the writing, the fairly remarkable production values, and particularly the acting of Fleur Geffrier (Camille) and Tomohisa Yamashita (Issei) made the story vividly compelling.
First-season spoiler coming up, so if you haven’t seen it, stop reading here.
Short version: Camille wins. Longer version: It’s complicated. But the net-net is that when the second season begins, Camille is ensconced at the fictional Domaine de Chassangre in southern France (shot at the very not-fictional Château de Beaucastel) with her winemaking fiancée and father-in-law. Issei is spending his time free-diving and trying to sort out his life, more or less. Enter a second legacy from Alexandre Léger: a mysterious bottle of wine so extraordinary that it provokes a kind of stunned amazement in anyone who tastes it — again, something that would be hard to swallow, so to speak, but for Geffrier and Yamashita’s gift for making you believe that a wine could, in fact, truly affect you that way.
Can a wine do that? Well, it’s a commonplace among wine pros that everyone in the business has one wine that changed everything for them, a wine that made them realize that something as simple as fermented grape juice could be transcendent (here’s mine). Regardless, the quest is on, and let’s just say the answer to what the mystery wine might be is both unexpected and, if you’ve ever traveled to its point of origin, strangely believable.
“I’ve always been struck by these wines’ emotional power, their raw authenticity, and the way they reconnect with something almost ancestral,” says sommelier and wine pro Seb Pradal, who consults on the show. “They remind us that wine is not only a product or a technique but a cultural language passed down through generations.”
For the actors, the show has been a journey of wine discovery as well. Neither Geffrier nor Yamashita were remotely wine experts when they were cast. But Geffrier says, “I think the most impressive and interesting thing that I learned about wine before the first season was how many aromas you can find in a bottle of wine — I didn’t expect at all to find leather or cut hay or musk! And I was very lucky to be able to discover new wines thanks to ‘Drops of God.’ In the first season, I remember discovering the great work of the Perrin Family, with their Château de Beaucastel Châteauneuf du Pape, then a red wine from the north of Italy, a Reboro from the Pisoni estate, and the remarkable work of the Amoreau family of Château le Puy, near Saint Emilion.”
In its second season, the award-winning show uses a single extraordinary bottle to explore how wine acquires meaning beyond taste.
Courtesy of Apple TV
As with the first season, it’s the story and the relationship between Camille Léger and Issei Tomine that lie at the heart of the show.
Perhaps look at it this way: Wine is like fly-fishing. I say that thinking back to the great novella “A River Runs Through It” (not so much the gorgeous but somewhat static movie made from it). On the surface, much of Norman MacLean’s story concerns fishing. But it’s really a story about the narrator and his brother, about life, grace, and loss.
When MacLean writes, “I knew already that he was going to be a master with a rod. He had those extra things besides fine training — genius, luck, and plenty of self-confidence. Even at this age, he liked to bet on himself against anybody who would fish with him, including me, his older brother,” the part of his brother’s character that will ultimately destroy him is presaged in that description.
In Drops of God, Camille says at one point, “Wine is like music. It connects you to your emotions.” That’s the actual mystery of what’s in that unknown bottle, and the reason this second season draws you in, episode after episode — or glass after glass — until the end.
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