2010 was a great year for Mankas Hills Vineyards. We received some top awards, released some great new Cabs, and had a healthy growth in our business. The weather conditions were jittery and seriously affected many California winegrowers. However, thanks to timely and decisive efforts on our vines we managed to end up with an abundant and quality harvest.

For 2011, we start the year off by releasing two fabulous wines.

The first is our premier 2007 Contado Mankas Cabernet Sauvignon. This wine is produced with the best selection of the 2007 harvest and for this vintage we’ve aged it for 24 months in oak barrels and we’re releasing it after letting it rest for more than a year in the bottle. This wine goes out the door already with a Silver Medal from the 2011 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition and continues to gather accolades in the tradition of our past Contados.

Our second wine is our brand new 2007 Piola Merlot. This is our first release of a Merlot and it comes at the request of many of our customers. It is an enjoyable medium bodied wine which pairs well with every day meals in the tradition of our Piola brand. Initial feedback has been excellent and it too goes to market with a Silver Medal from the 2011 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition.

The distribution network of Mankas Hills is growing every year so check for these new wines at your local stores or check out our special prices online.

Cheers and thank you all for your continued support!

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.