In January 2026, the second season of Drops of God arrived on Apple TV+, picking up the story of Camille Leger and Issei Tomine as they hunt the origin of the world's greatest wine. The French-American-Japanese drama, based on the manga by Tadashi Agi and Shu Okimoto, created by Quoc Dang Tran and starring Fleur Geffrier and Tomohisa Yamashita, had won the 2024 International Emmy for Best Drama Series after its April 2023 debut; the new eight episodes ran from 21 January to 11 March 2026. A manga about blind tasting, adapted into trilingual prestige television: wine had become a subject, not set dressing.
That took two decades. Alexander Payne shot Sideways over ten weeks in October and November 2003 across Santa Barbara wine country. The film earned five Academy Award nominations and won Payne the Oscar for adapted screenplay, then achieved something rarer: it moved the market. Pinot Noir sales on the US West Coast rose by about 16 percent for years afterward, while a generation of viewers learned to sneer at Merlot.
The places became pilgrimage sites. The Hitching Post II in Buellton, where Miles and Jack share a bottle of Highliner at the bar with Maya, was used for three days of filming. Its co-owner Frank Ostini says the crew was considerate and a pleasure to work with. The motel where the characters stay, the former Windmill Inn in Buellton, is now the Sideways Inn; maps and tours in Solvang and the Santa Ynez Valley still trace Foxen, Firestone and Kalyra, and for the film's 20th anniversary the Hitching Post released a Sideways-labeled 2021 Highliner Pinot Noir.
We continue to be thrilled and grateful to have been a part of this production!
Frank Ostini, Hitching Post II
Wine's advantage on camera is that it is already visual: the pour, the color against glass, the landscape behind the tasting room. Payne understood this better than any director before him. His camera rarely hurries; the long takes in tasting rooms let the valley set the tempo, and the region repaid him with a permanent place on the tourist map.
A working winery becomes an idyll
Two years after Sideways, Ridley Scott filmed A Good Year (2006) at Chateau La Canorgue, the organic family winery tucked under the hilltop village of Bonnieux in the Luberon, renamed Chateau La Siroque for the film. Russell Crowe plays the London bond trader who inherits the estate from his uncle; Marion Cotillard and Albert Finney co-star. Scott, who kept a vacation home and vineyard in the Luberon, shot the French scenes around Bonnieux, Cucuron and Gordes.
The judgment, dramatized
In 2008 came Bottle Shock, the dramatization of the 1976 Judgment of Paris, in which Chateau Montelena's 1973 Chardonnay took top honors among the whites. Some of the film was shot at the estate itself: the ivy-covered 1880s stone chateau in Calistoga, with its Jade Lake and pagoda islands, ranked among the most photographed wineries in Napa. This spring was fifty years since the 1976 tasting. The film fudges history, downplaying the role of then-winemaker Mike Grgich, a reminder that Hollywood remembers stories, not facts. Each of these films uses a real place as narrative machinery. La Canorgue is not scenery in A Good Year; the inheritance of the estate is the plot. Montelena is not a backdrop in Bottle Shock; it is the film's central wager. And in Drops of God, the hunt for the origin of the world's greatest wine turns connoisseurship itself into a quest narrative, the first time television has treated wine knowledge as the engine of a prestige drama rather than the garnish.
The biopic
The wine biopic arrived with Widow Clicquot (2023), directed by Thomas Napper from Tilar J. Mazzeo's 2008 biography, with Haley Bennett as Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot, the widow who built the Veuve Clicquot house after her husband's death. Principal photography took place in Chablis and Reims in October 2022. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2023, opened in the US in July 2024, and began streaming on Netflix that November; 80 percent of critics' reviews on Rotten Tomatoes were positive.
The camera arrives, the place stays
The pattern holds across the decades. Hitching Post II still pours for visitors who came because of a film; Montelena offers a 'Beyond Paris and Hollywood' tour; Sideways maps circulate in Solvang. Wine country learned what Hollywood always knew: a beautiful place, well lit, sells itself forever.
