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.

As the holiday season draws to a close we would like to once again thank all our customers and friends for making 2007 a success.

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.