We’re happy to announce that in the latest 2010 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition, Mankas Hills Vineyards won two Gold Medals for our Cabernet Sauvignon. The competition had a world-record breaking 4913 entries judged by 63 professional wine experts.

The first gold was for our premier 2006 Contado Mankas Cabernet Sauvignon. Produced with the best selection of our harvest and aged 16 months in oak barrels, this is the 5th release of the Contado Mankas. Our 2002 vintage received a Gold Medal also, and all other vintages since have won Silver Medals. We have introduced the wine at a special introductory price which you can take advantage of right away. Half cases are also available with delivery included.

Our second gold was for the 2007 Mankas, a classic European style Cabernet Sauvignon produced with a blend of our vineyards’ grape lots and aged 12 months in oak barrels.  We plan on releasing the wine in early May, but given the circumstances we will be sending it out to all our Wine Club members as part of their February shipment. This is a good opportunity to join our Wine Club which gives you a quarterly shipment of our wines, and special offers (such as this)

These wines will be featured at the Chronicle’s 2010 Public Tasting in Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, on February 20th. If you’re in the area drop by and try out our wines!

As the web continues to evolve, online communities that were once defined by blogs, comments, RSS feeds, and so on have now turned to Facebook and Twitter as easier, and more full featured mechanisms to exchange information quickly. These systems allow you to easily share what you like most with family, friends, colleagues or even the whole world.

For us, as we evolve our winery, we’ve found that keeping communities going is hard. We focus our limited resources on wine making and producing great wine which doesn’t leave us very much time for sharing events, news, etc. with our community in our blog. For this, we are always looking for innovations to help us get information out quicker and more concisely.

In this regards, the first thing we’ve done is to add ’sharing’ links to our wine pages (below the bottle images). This makes it easier for anyone who has Facebook, Digg, or Delicious accounts to share our page with their own communities. Clicking on those icons (and following the various steps each site makes you go through) will directly share the link to our wines on your personal pages.

For each wine we’ve also added a link to Snooth. Most of you know Facebook, Digg, etc. but you might not be familiar with Snooth. Snooth is a community site for wine lovers. You can easily follow wineries, review wines, research wines, etc. We’ve put some effort into adding all our wine information on the site, and urge any of you who have tried our wines to rate/review them there.

Finally, we’ve also started our own communities on Facebook and Twitter, as well as Snooth. If you’re part of these sites please become a Fan or follow our Tweets. We’re hoping that the “140 character Twitter mindset” will help us in focusing our messages and sharing information faster. As an incentive, we’re giving away a 20% discount coupon for all who become a Fan of our page on Facebook (we’re looking into ways to do this on Twitter too).

We hope you will join these online communities and help us share our passion for Cabernet.

As we begin 2010, all of us here at Mankas Hills Vineyards would like to wish you a Happy New Year and hope that everyone had a good beginning of the year.

This past year was a relatively good one for us considering the slow down in the economy. The continued support of our customers, the excellence of our wines and their affordable value made 2009 a successful year. A warm thank you goes out to all our customers.

The 2009 Harvest was a bounty. A sunny but relatively cool September and October enabled a slow ripening of the grapes which picked up excellent tannins and just about the right levels of sugar. We trust this will result in a well balanced wine with great flavor and aromas and alcohol levels below 14%.

Last March we bottled our 2007s, the first of which, the 2007 Piola Cabernet Sauvignon, met with great success with its low price point and everyday drinkable nature. Our 2007 Mankas Crest Dry Rose’ was also well received to cool down those hot summer days while winning a silver medal at the Riverside Wine Competition. We will be releasing the rest of the 2007s throughout this year as they mature in the bottle.

Our quality and value were widely recognized in 2009 at different Wine Competitions. An example is our 2006 Amelie Cabernet Sauvignon - Merlot which received 4 silver medals from 4 different international wine competitions. Check our Accolades page for a complete list of all our awards.

This year, in the online space, Mankas Hills Vineyards is planning to expand it’s online presence into the social networking sites as best we can. This includes Facebook and Twitter. Some of this has already started and will be highlighted in a follow on post. We hope that we’ll be able to be closer to our customer community as it has been a challenge given our small size and limited resources.

We look forward to another great year and wish the same for all.