Let's get the most important thing over with first. After reviewing Volume two and three, I did get my Comté cheese. I paired it with an affordable Côtes du Rhône red wine, fig crackers, and greens. It was delicious. Thank you for asking. Issei would have sneered. Or not. In these volumes, Shizuku enters the Tokyo Food and Wine competition with the staff at Mama-Miya, knowing that Issei is one of the judges. Everyone is worried that Issei will vote against Shizuku, but he has faith that his rival will be impartial. This is good, because not all the judges are.

The food and wine pairings here are fascinating, if not replicable. One of the challenges is pairing wine and sushi, which would genuinely be a complicated pairing. The choices of the finalists were not something you or I are likely to encounter, much less be able to buy and make, placing this battle wholly in the realm of fantasy.

But that is not important. It's never important whether you, personally, will get a chance at lobster sushi paired with champagne. The point is that you get the description of someone else eating lobster sushi with champagne. To quote an architecture teacher I had in college many decades ago, “Once you know it's there, you can always say you see it.” The audience at the festival is starving for food, wine, and descriptions of the pairing that make abstractions like “hints of blackberry” understandable to the average inner eye.

In the very best tradition of a battle manga, Shizuku's team is up against it the whole time— a high-class French restaurant, sabotage, a rival team who tortures sports analogies into their marriages. Shizuku's team, with the clever/cringe name of Mama-Miya, faces down all these challenges, and ultimately, we never truly worry, because it is way too early in this journey for there to be a setback.

More interesting than merely pairing wine with food, Shizuku has finally found the maturity to complement Miyabi, who does indeed look put together. He's ready to continue his journey and really buckle down to learn more about wine, to prepare for the next stage of the Drops of God discovery. Presumably, this next challenge will also reveal the identity of the next judge whose favor Issei and Shizuku must win to move ahead into the next round after that.

So, almost halfway into this series, let's really talk about why you might want to read it. The obvious reason is that you enjoy wine and want to learn something about it. However, this is much less of a teaching manga than the original Drops of God was. The creators of Mariage expect you, like Shizuku, to have some understanding of wine in general. Maybe you find yourself with a small collection of wine and don't wish to waste it on a mere cowboy steak, so this book can delve more deeply into how wine pairs with food, beyond white with fish, red with meat.

Maybe you like the battle aspect. Shizuku and Issei each pit their skill in Oenology against each other for a rare and special prize, and to gain the acclaim of the best in the field. If you liked watching the original Iron Chef television show, you might get a kick out of the extravagant creations and hyperbolic descriptions of the marriages here.

Or, maybe you just find it entertaining to look up some of these wines and find that bottle of wine goes for like US$80 right now, and wow, no.

In Mariage, we also get the “Drops of God” shadow council aspect, which puts this story, already ridiculously unhinged from reality, into the realms of purest fantasy. Who doesn't want to meet and learn about the weird, shadowy figures who preserve the secrecy behind a wine so perfect that its identity has to be kept hidden?

And, lastly, tucked in between all the over-exaggeration, the unreasonable ingredients, and unobtainable wines, there is a story about a young man who wants to understand more about himself, the planet on which he lives, and the friends with whom he shares some wine. In the end Drops of God: Mariage is about Shizuku, about his relationships, and his growth from a boy running away from his father's memory to become a man who can embrace it. That may not be what you look for in a manga, and frankly, I can hardly blame you. But I read adventure manga all the time to see young nobodies grow into interesting people. Shizuku is already more interesting than he was at the beginning of Drops of God, I'm interested to see who he becomes. And, to be honest, I want him and Miyabi to say what needs to be said.

I don't know how much more I have learned about wine from this sequel, but I can tell you that when I am in Paris next month, I am going to be paying way more attention to what wine I'm drinking than I have previously. I might not know much now, but when I get back, I am sure to be absolutely insufferable.