Now that we are in the middle of this sequel to Drops of God, the story is really hitting its stride once again. Shizuku lost the first round (to prove himself worthy of the challenge of identifying the “Drops of God”) to Issei, saved a local western-style izakaya from competitors and judges who used illicit and illegal means to destroy their reputation. In the aftermath of the Food & Wine competition, Shizuku and Miyabi are invited to a poignant final meal cooked by Chef Mikasa of the losing restaurant Angoulême, whose reputation is shattered by the duplicitous behavior of the restaurant owner and judge of the competition. Mikasa offers a piece of her own history, her genuine expertise, and leaves stage left….to reappear a moment later on stage right.

Shizuku and Issei are tasked with creating mariages for four classic French courses. All they receive is a menu, so each course will be investigated and analyzed, and then a wine will be found that creates a perfect pairing. And, finally, this manga finds its footing and begins to run.

I keep harping on the basic premise here, but to once again nag, this manga works best when it is reminding us to enjoy food and wine, and companionship. To do this, the original series wended its way around the globe, finding people with unsolvable problems that were solved when just the right wine was found. Now that finding the right wine is the problem to solve, it's taken until now to find the perfect mariage of character and conundrum. Mikasa joins the cast as Shizuku's companion in this next-level wine and food conversation.

Chef Mikasa, knowing that she will never work again in Japan, heads to France, where she wishes to reopen the restaurant that changed her life as a child, setting her on her way to becoming a chef. She's enlisted Shizuku to help her stock wine and offered her skills to help him find his mariages for the competition.

Volume 7 really takes off as we add another staple of this series to the cast—a weird old man. This weird old man, Louis, turns out to be a key player in Mikasa's story. And then…the story takes on wines of the world in a whirlwind tour at a wine exposition in London. You might be wondering if that could be interesting to anyone who isn't a wine buyer, but…yeah, it really was!

We learn about wine négociants, who have a whole interesting history of their own (if you like learning about things like the economies of wine, but hey, if you read Spice and Wolf, I do not want to hear a word) and Bulgarian Txakoli. I've had Basque Txakoli (ironically, thanks to Kodansha's own Director of Publications, Ben Applegate), but now I want to try Bulgarian, too. My two favorite discoveries in this book are a (still) reasonably priced Cote de Provence rosé that is paired with ratatouille. I don't love the latter, but do really enjoy Cote de Provence rosés. And the discovery that one of the very most respected people in the wine world is an English woman named Jancis Robertson. She is the only person from outside the world of wine who has been awarded the Master of Wine. Seriously, isn't that cool?

As the passion for wine and food really begins to heat up in these volumes, there are some other relationships developing as well. Miyabi and Shizuku are still not saying the words that need to be said, and the plot hands them an extremely manga scenario to get them to kiss, /eyeroll/, but they are getting closer to being the item they will obviously become because we know how manga works. More interesting is the entirely unelectric but inevitable thing between Mikasa and Louis, who go from formal to familiar in 2 panels that even made Shizuku smirk. If the puppy dog gets it, it's really hard to miss.

One last thing I want to mention that I did forget to mention in my last review, Mikasa's restaurant Angoulêmeis named after the town that hosts the Angoulême International Comics Festival, the second-largest comics festival in Europe and getting bigger every year, and is home to many of France's animation studios, so sort of an inside joke there for a manga.

It's taken 6 volumes, but this is exactly where this series shines. We're reading about foods we recognize and affordable wines again, while we're watching pretty people drink wines we're not going to be buying, as they cook food we're not going to be making. I'm heading to France in 2 weeks to be a guest at Y/Con, and you can be 100% sure I'll actually be paying attention to every wine I drink this time. How could I not? Worse, I'll be paying attention to the mariage of everything I eat with it. There's no doubt I'll be even more absolutely insufferable than usual thanks to this manga.Drops of God: Mariage is a fantastic primer on being “that guy” when you go out with friends.