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!

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.

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.

We are taking this opportunity to have a big yearly sale of cases of all our wines. You will find special discounts between 10% and 30% off our already discounted prices. Delivery, as always, on our cases is included.

We recommend our 2003 Contado Mankas Cabernet Sauvignon. This cab has been maturing nicely in the bottle and is an excellent wine to serve for any occasion. We are offering it at a discount of 30% throughout the month.

If unsure which wine to try, give our samplers cases a try. These are collections of our wines gathered into a case at a great discount. They give you the ability to sample many of our wines and let you decide what your favorite is.

We hope all our readers will take advantage of this great sale and join us in celebrating this special month.

• 2007 Mankas Crest Dry Rose’ 
• 2007 Piola Cabernet Sauvignon
• 2006 Mankas Cabernet Sauvignon
• 2006 Amelie Cabernet Sauvignon - Merlot

Some of you might have noticed that we now tend to release our wines after they have aged 2 years; one year in barrels and one year in the bottle.  This is because, over the years, we have noticed that our cabs age extremely well and improve in quality for many years after bottling. Our 2002 Contado Mankas, for instance, is still improving after 5 years in the bottle (unfortunately we have only a very limited number of cases left of that vintage which reached a gold medal in 2005).

We don’t follow this rule for the 2007 Piola and 2007 Mankas Crest Rose’ as they are addressing the demand from our customers that prefer younger and lighter wines at an affordable price.

After bottling a vintage we generally send it to some of the most renown wine competitions in order to get a qualified assessment of our quality. We believe wine competitions are a real and valid market test on quality because of the large panel of expert tasters evaluating the wines. Up to now we’ve won the following medals on our latest wines:

2006 Mankas Cabernet Sauvignon

• Silver Medal at the 2009 Pacific Rim Wine Competition
• Bronze Medal at the 2009 San Francisco International Wine Competition

2007 Mankas Crest Dry Rose’

• Silver Medal at the 2009 Riverside International Wine Competition
• Bronze Medal at the 2009 L.A. County Fair Wine Competition

2006 Amelie Cabernet - Merlot

• Silver Medal at the 2009 Pacific Rim Wine Competition
• Silver Medal at the 2009 Riverside International Wine Competition
• Silver Medal at the 2009 L.A. County Fair Wine Competition
• Silver Medal at the 2009 San Francisco International Wine Competition

Check our Accolades and Awards page for a complete list.

Look for the 2006 Amelie which has just been released! The 2006 Contado Mankas we feel is still “young” and we plan on releasing it at the end of 2009. For those of you in our wine club, you will start receiving some of these wines starting this month and in future shipments. You can check our wine club schedule to find out what you will receive. Enjoy!

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!

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.

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.

2007 was a busy year for Mankas Hills Vineyards. We once again significantly increased our customers and sales figures. At the same time we’ve been doing some changes of suppliers to improve our products and efficiencies while building a new warehousing facility. We’ve also made improvements on our web site, adding a virtual tour of our vineyard and a new shopping cart that will improve the purchasing experience and your ability to access new products and services.

This year in March we bottled our 2005 wines: the 2005 Contado Mankas Cabernet Sauvignon, the 2005 Mankas Cabernet Sauvignon, the 2005 Amelie Cabernet Sauvignon-Merlot and the 2005 Mankas Crest Dry Rose’. We released the 2005 Mankas Crest at the end of 2007 and early this year we will be releasing the others as they are ready. Keep an eye on our site to take advantage of introductory offers related to these releases. Along with these new releases will come new sampler cases so that you can try an assortment.

The harvest this year started in late September, after a warm summer. The grapes had a fast sugar pick up, however, thanks to our canopy management and fruit thinning techniques we were able to harvest some of the mini-terroirs of the vineyard in mid-October for optimal phenolic content, which will give us some great 2006 wines.

All this hasn’t given us much time to blog. In the coming year we hope things will settle down and we can dedicate more time to blogging. We are looking for someone to help us write some of the entries as it takes us a considerable time to make a well thought out blog entry.

In this 2008 we are planning to bottle our 2006 wines which are coming along very well. We were delayed in the bottling of our Piola wine but will be introducing it in the middle of the coming year. We also plan to keep on adding to our web site with more information about our vineyards and processes.

As always we’re maintaining our focus on producing great Cabernet Sauvignon based on a passion for viticulture inherited from our family. We are confident that the blend of old world know how and the exciting American wine making technology and business practices will help us to continue to bring you some great wines for your enjoyment at affordable prices.

The warmest thanks for all your business and interest and best wishes for a Happy and Prosperous 2008.

We love to take pictures of the vineyard during the seasons, our various events like the harvest and bottlings, and anything else that might be going on at Mankas Hills Vineyards. So we thought we’d put together a nice slide show for you to see all this. You can take a look at it here.

On a technical note, the Vineyard Tour is a DHTML/CSS/Javascript page which means that it might not work on some browsers. We’ve tested it in Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 and Internet Explorer 6 and 7. If for some reason it doesn’t work for you, let us know and we’ll try to fix it.

Let us know how you like it and keep an eye on it as we’ll be adding more pictures to it periodically.