SPOILER ALERT: The following story contains plot details from “The Price of Passion,” Season 2, Episode 8 of “Drops of God,” now streaming on Apple TV.
The first season of the Apple TV drama “Drops of God” ended on a euphoric high. Having won the competition set by her late, estranged father Alexandre (Stanley Weber) to determine the heir to his wine empire, Camille Leger (Fleur Geffrier) took an important step toward overcoming Alexandre’s toxic emotional legacy. Though Camille inherited Alexandre’s entire wine collection — valued at hundreds of millions of dollars — she sent half to his protegé and her rival Issei Tomine (Tomohisa Yamashita), who she’d discovered was actually Alexandre’s son through an affair and, therefore, her half brother. To the twinkling sounds of The The’s “This Is the Day,” Issei read the note Camille sent with the delivery: “Brother and sister.”
Three years later, Season 2 has concluded on a much less celebratory note. Camille and Issei have completed yet another posthumous challenge set by Alexandre: Track down the origins of what he deemed the world’s greatest wine, an unlabeled red in a wax-sealed bottle. But they did it at great cost. By the March 11 finale, Camille has alienated her fiancée Thomas (Tom Wozniczka), resigned from her position stewarding Alexandre’s prestigious wine guide and failed in her mission to preserve the mystery wine, which she’d traced to a household producer in Georgia caught in the crosshairs of a family dispute. Issei is in a slightly better place, having entered a new relationship and washed his hands of the Georgia saga. He’s also just starting to process a devastating loss: the suicide of his distant, imperious mother Honoka (Makiko Watanabe), ashamed of a lack of connection with her only child.
With Issei now orphaned and Camille adrift, the siblings are left to rely on each other. And that’s exactly where the final shot of Season 2 finds them: shoulder to shoulder, looking into the sunset. “He’s opening his arms to her and saying, ‘Come,” Geffrier tells Variety. “She does have him at this moment — just Issei. Because everybody’s shutting their door to her and she realizes he’s here, still.”
Originally, “Drops of God” was intended to be a limited series; the end of Alexandre’s competition is also the end of the Japanese manga on which the TV show is based. But when Apple TV expressed interest in continuing the story, lead producer Klaus Zimmermann decided to take on the opportunity. “It’s dangerous, because you never know how good your ideas are going to be,” Zimmermann says. “But it’s also fun.” Creator Quoc Dang Tran, in demand after the success of Season 1, departed for other projects, but writer Sonia Moyersoen provided behind-the-scenes continuity between seasons; Zimmermann calls her “the heart and soul of the show.”
Season 1 didn’t adapt every storyline from the manga, leaving material like Honoka’s fate on the table. To move Camille and Issei forward, however, the “Drops of God” team started with their new positions. “For her, wine has become the center of her life,” Zimmermann says — something Camille never expected after Alexandre left the picture. (Camille even stopped drinking for years due to her intense synesthesia.) As for Issei, “he found a sister — but in the end, he lost the competition. And he’s very ambitious, so he’s in a dark, dark place.”
Literally: as of Season 2, Issei has taken up freediving, a hobby that brings him face-to-face with a fear of the dark that seems to spring from repressed childhood memories. Yamashita had already acquired a taste for wine through his work on Season 1, particularly strong, deep vintages from California’s Napa Valley. His prep for the follow-up was slightly more intense, involving free dives of up to 15 meters in a French swimming pool under a coach’s supervision. The actor found the experience unpleasant — “It was very odd, and I don’t want to do that again” — but understood why his character was drawn to the practice.
“Free diving is something that’s all about you. It’s all up to you,” Yamashita says, speaking through an interpreter. “So in order to really face his trauma head-on, by himself, he had to be alone. Diving was something that helped him do that.”
Season 2 is an inverse of its predecessor, in that it’s framed around Issei. “Drops of God” introduced the world of wine through Camille’s eyes, and Season 1 ended with her triumph. There’s still plenty to explore on her side, and Season 2 highlights how much of her father’s daughter Camille really is despite her belief she’s worked through any emotional baggage. But there was more blank space to fill in on Issei’s end, with Season 2 swapping out fantasy sequences in Camille’s mind palace for Issei’s visions of black-and-white moonscapes to that effect.
Geffrier embraced the pivot. “I’m here to serve the script and the show, and the show needed to go deeper on Issei,” she says. “It’s not about me; it’s about the story.”
Fittingly for a show that puts a heavy emphasis on terroir, “Drops of God” also introduced a new character in Season 2: the country of Georgia, the oldest winemaking region in the world (eight millennia old, to be precise) and the source of Alexandre’s Holy Grail. “We needed someplace that was hidden, but where you could believably say, ‘This is where the best wine in the world is made,” Zimmermann explains. Georgia also has a tradition of small-batch, noncommercial production that fits with an ephemeral product like the wine, which effectively goes extinct by the end of the season. “Drops of God” was already a globe-spanning production with major locations in Japan and France; Season 2 added Central Asia as well as Spain and Greece to the mix. “The ambition needed to be higher,” Zimmermann says. “You have to bring the audience something new.”
Nevertheless, Camille and Issei’s relationship remains the foundation of the show, and continuing into Season 2 allowed “Drops of God” to explore their connection past its infancy. “Season 1, we discovered they are siblings,” Geffrier says. “Season 2, they try to be siblings.” That involves conflict, like Issei’s resentment of Camille and Camille’s refusal to listen when he cautions her not to get involved in the Georgian winery drama, as well as understanding. As uplifting as the final moments of Season 1 were, that didn’t represent the reality of family members with different backgrounds and lives who only met in their 30s.
Unlike when Season 1 ended in 2023, there’s an explicit intent to continue “Drops of God” in a potential Season 3, though Apple has yet to announce a renewal. Both lead stars see more room for their characters to grow: Camille in picking herself up off the ground, Issei in mourning a second parent. “Losing a family member is a really, really tough thing,” Yamashita says. “To overcome that loss is something that opens a new chapter for Issei.” Geffrier concurs: “When you hit the very bottom, the next move is to go up. I think she’ll do it.” (She also hopes Camille and Thomas will reconcile.)
Whatever lies ahead for the show, “Drops of God” has already transformed its principals’ relationship to wine, the show’s central subject. “You realize how personal wine is,” Zimmermann says. “There is not a single wine the same in the world.” Even to those without a passion for fermented grapes, “Drops of God” pulls you into its world with the same personal appeal. Camille and Issei are complex, specific people, ones who continue to grow just like the vines they obsess over.
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