Review | Taut Apple TV+ drama Drops of God uncorks wine snobbery as two experts go nose to nose in a tasting competition in Japan
- French-Japanese production Drops of God follows a wine-tasting competition in Japan and puts the boot into the pomposity that surrounds winemaking
- Meanwhile, in BBC Earth series World’s Most Dangerous Roads, comedians tackle hazardous routes in an SUV while failing to entertain
A heady whiff of smug satisfaction surely accompanies the enjoyment of Drops of God (Apple TV+) – at least that of anyone who has ever felt short-changed having bought expensive French wine.
Largely through radical, abrasive French oenologist Alexandre Léger (Stanley Weber), the series puts the boot into the pretence and pomposity that surrounds winemaking and tasting. But being a French-Japanese co-production, its glare is steered by Léger’s disgust at the fact that consumers pay for renowned, usually French, labels regardless of a wine’s quality.
As he tells a disapproving French guest at a French embassy bash in Tokyo: “The problem is snobbery in France.” Today, he’d be called an industry disrupter.
That Léger should be in Japan at all, where he teaches a university oenology class, is thanks to his blunt refusal to join the French wine establishment gravy train. But thus far, this is just part of the flashback appetiser to an ingeniously told, surprisingly taut tale of what will happen to Léger’s multimillion-dollar, Japanese-based wine estate – now that he is dead.
Manipulative even from beyond the grave, Léger, in a message to estranged daughter Camille (Fleur Geffrier), admits to having seemed like a “weirdo” father, “sadistic and toxic”. This characterisation is borne out by his setting a test for Camille, with his entire legacy at stake.
To earn it, she must compete, in Japan, with the protégé and “spiritual son” Léger took on in Tokyo: taciturn wine lover and reluctant heir to a family diamond-business fortune, Issei Tomine (Tomohisa Yamashita). Not that he has it much easier, being disowned, because of his “Western” passion, by a disapproving, traditional family that isn’t exactly a vat of laughs.
And to complicate further for Camille what must be the biggest “wine-off” in history, which is also attracting feverish media attention, she can’t drink alcohol – something of a problem in a big-money wine-tasting contest, but one that galvanises her allies, including Kyoko Takenaka as a formidable sommelier.
Drops of God is derived from the Japanese manga Kami no Shizuku, which is credited with having inspired a wine craze in China. French-Vietnamese screenwriter Quoc Dang Tran accordingly allows flashback-vintage Alexandre the prescient observation that China, among other countries, will soon be producing wines that will challenge French vinicultural complacency.
Kampai!
Comedy-driven it isn’t
Is it a travel show? Is it motoring? Reality television? Friends having a laugh?
World’s Most Dangerous Roads (BBC Earth) is all these and none, somehow simultaneously avoiding definition and the duty to be entertaining, at least in the first few episodes.
Each of eight instalments in series four puts a couple of old chums (mostly comedians) in an SUV and sends them off to tackle what it says in the title – while they save their best material for other appearances.
En route, Phil Wang and Pierre Novellie in Lesotho; Keith Lemon and Will Mellor in Albania; and Zoe Lyons and Joe Wilkinson in Turkey share tepid secrets for our benefit. Being novice adventurers and, in British-Malaysian comic Wang’s case a “certified indoorsman”, they also scream and curse colourfully at often benign-looking terrain.
If Lyons and the lugubrious Wilkinson step on the gas they could really “get the bends” on Turkey’s treacherous Derebasi Bends; eschewing all jeopardy, Wang misses the chance of a daring prang by inching down from Africa’s highest pub in first gear. So what’s the point?
Perhaps TV flattens the perspective, as well as our expectations. But occasionally it’s fair to think, “I’m a fee-paying viewer – get these underwhelming celebrities out of here.”
