More Wine Weirdness: Kami no Shizuku

Thanks to the perspicacious Alder Yarrow over at Vinography, I now have a better idea of who my competition is, out there in the world of wine punditry. Somehow, though, I never expected it to be a character in a Japanese comic book. Kami no Shizuku (which translates to "the drops of God"), a Japanese manga, follows the life of a young wine connoiseur, Shizuku Kanzaki, as he tries to track down twelve wines described in his late father's will; if he finds them before his brother, a sommelier (an evil sommelier? how cool), he will receive the keys to his father's cellar. The fascinating bit is that apparently more than 500,000 people read this story every week, with the result that the comic exerts huge influence over the Asian wine market, according to UK's Telegraph. Sort of makes you wish you were just pen-and-ink, instead of this too, too solid flesh. 

Here's another good story about this subject in the Japan Times, and a link to an illustration.