We’re proud to announce the launch of the Mankas Hills Vineyards Wine Club. After quite a bit of thought on how best to set it up for our customers and after going through various iterations, we finally launched it late in August.

Our Wine Club is fairly simple and it leaves you with choices given our wine portfolio. We ship out 3 different wines every quarter to our members and according to the level of membership they’ll receive 1, 2 or 4 of each bottle. Being a member, makes you part of the Mankas Hills Vineyards family. We discount the wine we send you and also the wine that you might purchase in addition. Shipping costs are included in the price and you have access to early releases of our wines. We also announce far ahead of time what wines we are going to ship each quarter so you can see what’s coming. You can find out more on our Wine Club program page and our Wine Club FAQ page.

We hope this will give you the opportunity to taste our wines and have them on hand throughout the year at a great price. Give it a try!

If you’ve been watching our site closely these last few months we’ve added yet more awards to our already long list of accolades won by Mankas Hills Vineyards wines.

In the recent 2008 Riverside International Wine Competition, the 2005 Contado Mankas Cabernet Sauvignon won a Silver Medal. This was among more than 2600 wines entered into the competition. If you haven’t tried the 2005 Contado yet, it’s a deep and  intense ruby color  and rich in flavors of blackberries tannins and spicy aromas of bell peppers. Eucalyptus and cinnamon combine with accents of plum, cassis and wild berries for a long lingering finish. The silky, and complex texture exemplifies the power of the grapes from our vineyard

To add to our excitement, our 2005 Amelie Cabernet Sauvignon-Merlot  placed topped this with a Critics Platinum Award at the 2008 Critics Challenge. Nearly 1700 wines were evaluated and only 79 won the coveted Platinum award.  Notes for each winning entry are published on Wine Review Online  and this is what they had to say about this wine:

“Earthy and leafy, so it’s not just about fruit, which is toned down. This is a serious effort, with fruit and non-fruit elements that are balanced and play off nicely against each other.  Lovely, captivating nose. A real standout in this group. Delicate finish” — Michael Apstein

These two wines are already available on our site so we urge you to give them a try. You can also try all our 2005 wines in one case, with our 2005 Sampler, or along with all our 2003 and 2004 wines in our Mankas Hills Sampler.

More competitions are occurring this summer so keep an eye on our accolades page and this blog for updates.

Just a quick note to let everyone know that we’ve done some restructuring of our sampler cases. As those of you familiar with our site know, our samplers are a great way to try out our wines. They group together certain wines at a nice discount so that you get both the benefit of trying all the wines together and at a better price.

With the introduction of our 2005 wines we changed them to reflect the latest vintages. There were 3 major changes made:

• We regrouped the samplers into vintages so that you can have a complete tasting of our wines for a particular year.
• We enhanced our popular, ‘Mankas Hills Sampler’ to include all our 2005 wines so that you can now try our gamut of wines from 2003 to 2005.
• We have added a new ‘Top Award Sampler’, which only includes wines that have won 2 silver (or better) medal awards from separate recognized wine competitions. Right now this includes the 2002 Contado Mankas, the 2004 Amelie and the 2004 Contado Mankas, but this could grow as we receive more accolades.

We hope that through these samplers we’re giving everyone more opportunities to sample our wines and discover the quality and excellence of our vineyard.

We’d like to hear from you about our samplers. If you have any requests or suggestions on samplers we should add please e-mail them to us at info@mankashills.com and we’ll look into adding them.