Is Drops of God the perfect TV series?

Drops of God is one of those gems of purest ray serene that cable TV prefers to keep hidden in its deep unfathomed caves because it thinks you want something more lowbrow. Try finding it by accident: you won’t. When I looked for it on Apple – which doesn’t have all that many shows – I had laboriously to type in its name. It wasn’t offered to me in the recommendations. If I hadn’t been tipped off by my friends Candy and Diarmuid, I would never have seen it.

I had been lamenting, as I often do, the dearth of stuff to watch on TV that doesn’t put you through the emotional wringer. When I settle down for an evening on the sofa after a hard day’s not working, I want to be taken to a happy place rather than be overstimulated by some torture-porn atrocity about a small-town detective investigating grisly murders by an occult-inspired serial killer. Nor do I want sex; nor, particularly, yet more dystopian sci-fi; nor something self-consciously wry and quirky about a psychoanalyst featuring a rehabilitated Hollywood megastar. I want something more European in sensibility: oblique, meditative, art-house, intelligent, gentle. Drops of God does the job just perfectly.

The premise is enticing. A French connoisseur of fine wines has just died and, being a tricksy, demanding, obsessive fellow he has left the potential heirs to his stupendous fortune – a magnificent Toyko apartment and the world’s best private cellar, worth gazillions – a challenge. They must blind taste and correctly identify a series of his most treasured and obscure vintages. Winner takes all.

There are two contestants. One is his estranged daughter, Camille (Fleur Geffrier), whom he trained up when she was very young to identify every conceivable aroma, from lychee to moss, using first a Nez du Vin kit and then his private stock. The other is his former star student, a taciturn, handsome, otherworldly Japanese lad Issei Tomine (Tomohisa Yamashita), so meticulous in his quest for perfect knowledge that he even gets soil samples from all the world’s greatest terroirs sent to his home so that he can inhale their mineral complexity.

Your sympathies waver between the rivals as you learn more about them. Like the fine wines they swirl, sniff and spit they are multi-layered, mysterious, the product of peculiar circumstance. Issei, though a bit of a cold fish with his immaculate, monochrome wardrobe and diffident manner, becomes much more likable when you understand his background. His unloving mother is in thrall to the family patriarch, her unbending, fierce billionaire father (who refuses to give Issei a single sen of his diamond fortune unless he abandons all this wine-tasting with gaijin nonsense). Issei’s dad, the one who loves him, is treated as a second-class citizen.

Camille, meanwhile, is attractive but bolshy and a bit of a home-wrecker. I’m not sure I approve of the way she muscles in on handsome childhood friend Thomas Chassangre (Tom Wozniczka), who is on the verge of marrying a nice girl on his idyllic Rhône estate. But as the father’s daughter she is surely the more deserving candidate. Also, she suffers from a pretty major underdog drawback: every time the tiniest amount of alcohol goes down her throat she develops a nosebleed, which makes accurate wine-tasting a near impossibility.

I want something more European in sensibility: oblique, meditative, art-house, intelligent, gentle

If only they could both win! Obviously I’m not going to tell you how Drops of God resolves this conundrum, but what I can say is that the various plot threads – the romances, the family disputes and estrangements, the competition – are eventually tied together in a way that leaves you with a warm glow. Yes, there’s going to be a second season. But unlike so many of these series, you’re not left with an irksome cliffhanger.

Directed by Oded Ruskin, and adapted by Quoc Dang Tran from a manga series, Drops of God could have been quite dull: how, after all, do you make a gripping, attractive drama about taste and smell? But Ruskin has found a clever way of making the invisible visible (explosions of color; journeys through labyrinthine mental libraries), the locations (from Paris and southern France to Trento in Italy, and Tokyo) are sumptuous, and even the minor characters so well developed and rounded that they start to feel like real friends (and enemies).

It has been many years since I was an obsessive oenophile (not since I bought a couple of cases of en primeur 1990 Burgundy, in fact). And though I barely touch a drop of wine nowadays, this endlessly beguiling, inventive series has made me seriously reconsider the error of my ways.