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.

2006 was a great year for Mankas Hills Vineyards. The number of people who discovered and enjoyed our wines has grown considerably and so have our sales. We were able to increase our distribution channels so that we can bring our wines to more of you at your local stores.

This year we had 3 great releases: the 2004 Amelie Cabernet Sauvignon - Merlot, the 2004 Contado Mankas Cabernet Sauvignon and the 2004 Mankas Cabernet Sauvignon. These last two we’ve just released and you can get a great discount on cases for this holiday season with, as with all our cases, delivery included. You can also try them both together in our 2004 Cabernet Sampler Case. These wines truly reflect the dedication we have for producing top quality Cabernet Sauvignon grapes and turning them into great wine. The long list of accolades we’ve received at internationally renown competitions confirm the consistency of our quality.

In 2005 we also ran our 2004 Amelie for Bloggers campaign. This was for all you bloggers out there to sample this great release. Many enjoyed the wine and if you do a simple blog search for us you’ll find various articles and tasting notes. Unfortunately we won’t be able to extend this offer on other releases as we’ve since learned that California laws do not permit this. However we are looking at other ways to allow bloggers to sample our wines in respect of the law so we can keep contributing something back to this community.

The 2006 harvest turned out to be a good one thanks to the sunny and cool weather we had in September and October. Our grapes enjoyed a long hang time on the vines as the harvest was completed towards the end of October. They also benefited from the meticulous fruit thinning which enhanced aromas and flavors.

In 2007 we plan on bottling the next releases of our lines of wine: the 2005 Mankas Cabernet Sauvignon, 2005 Contado Mankas Cabernet Sauvignon, and the 2005 Amelie Cabernet Sauvignon - Merlot. We also plan on introducing a new table wine: the 2005 Piola.

Lately we haven’t been able to keep you updated with all the latest events in our blog as we’d like. We’ve just been too busy with all that’s going on at the vineyard. In the coming year we’ll try to catch up and give you more insight into what we are doing.

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 winemaking technology and business practices will help us to continue to bring you some great wines for your enjoyment at affordable prices.

Happy Holidays and Best Wishes for a Prosperous 2007.

Various wineries are celebrating with special events, sales, promotions and so on. To celebrate this special month we are discounting all our wine cases an additional 10% and our Mankas Hills Sampler Case 15%. As always with delivery included in the price.

What is a Mankas Hills Sampler Case? It’s a case of 12 bottles that contains 2 bottles of each of our current wines. This is a great way to sample all our wines, compare and constrast them and figure out which one you like best. You can find out more about it here

We hope all our readers will take advantage of this great sale (including all the bloggers who have up to now participated in our 2004 Amelie offer and enjoyed their bottle), and join us in celebrating this special month.

Following the Suckering and Thinning process we described in one of our previous posts, the next step that happens during the summer (usually in July) is Summer Hedging. This is another very important step in growing premium grapes.

The vines after the blooming season grow very long and vigorous shoots creating a thick and messy canopy. To rebalance the vine, in early July these shoots are trimmed to keep only 15-17 leaves per vine and an ideal number of lateral shoots.

Vines before summer hedging.

This enables the development of a regular curtain canopy with proper foliage density essential to the development and ripening of premium grapes. The timely trimming of the shoots enables the vines to focus on the development of the grapes with the best characteristics resulting in increased cluster yield, improved soluble solid, increased total polyphenoles and nitrogen content and berries with a favorable skin to pulp ratio. It also reduces any unwanted herbaceous tones in the wine.

This operation in our vineyard is done manually by a team of operators in order to complete it in a window of time of 2-4 weeks from blooming. Studies have proven that the quality of the grapes depend on the lag time between the summer hedging and the blooming of the grapes. Also if the hedging is done in time the vines do not loose vigor due to the development of the lateral shoots.

Curtain canopy after summer hedging with well developed lateral shoots.

Manual summer hedging is more costly than mechanical but it minimizes the shock that the vines have to endure as it works almost like a non intrusive operation. This enables the vine to continue undisturbed with its productive cycle and with minimal recovery time. It is just a gentle refocusing of efforts in the vines to try to create the best wines for our customers.

Our 2004 Amelie Cabernet Sauvignon - Merlot was awarded a silver medal at the San Francisco International Wine Competition. At this same competition our 2004 Contado Mankas was awarded a bronze medal. At the Long Beach Grand Cru the 2004 Contado Mankas received a bronze medal also.

We are also happy to note that within the list of Bordeaux Blends awarded a silver medal at the SF Wine competition, the Amelie is within the wines with the lowest retail price. This fits well with our strategy of producing value for our customers.

More than 1000 wineries from 18 countries competed for awards at the SF Wine Competition, which is one of the most popular in the USA. There were more than 1900 wineries participating in the Long Beach Grand Cru.

As our readers and customer know, the 2004 Amelie is a blend of 75% Cabernet Sauvignon and 25% Merlot. It is an elegant, lively, and joyful wine that has already captured the attention of many.

The 2004 Contado Mankas is our 100% Cabernet Sauvignon already bottled but still aging before it is released to the market.

Mankas Hills Vineyards is a small endeavor and not very widely known yet. We have some excellent Cabernets which we would like everyone to find out about and we really believe in the power of word of mouth and Web 2.0.

Recently I’ve seen a few other wine producers use blogs and the Internet effectively as great tools for sharing their passion for wine and offering the community the opportunity to share it with them. I’ve been authorized to do something similar.

So here is our offer: Mankas Hills Vineyards would like to send a sample bottle of our new 2004 Amelie Cabernet Sauvignon - Merlot out to anyone who has a blog and lives in the United States.

This is our way of sharing what we think is a great wine with the blogging community (if you’ve been reading this blog you’ll know I have a special attachment to this wine). Of course, we hope you will enjoy it so much to blog about it, share the love with your friends and, potentially even order more. But there is no obligation whatsoever, just enjoy the wine for yourself.

There’s a few restrictions and current laws don’t permit everyone to participate so here they are:

• You have to be over 21.
• You have to have a shipping address in one of these states: CA, CO, HI, IA, ID, IL, MN, MO, NE, NV, NH, NM, ND, OR, TX, WA, WI and WY.
• You need to have a blog that had at least a post in the last 3 months and has been online for more than 3 months.

Of course, we reserve the right to stop the offer any time.

In order to participate send an e-mail to info@mankashills.com with the subject ‘2004 Amelie for Bloggers’. Include the following:

1. A note stating that you are 21 years or older with your date of birth (you will have to sign for the wine when it is delivered).
2. Your shipping address.
3. Your blog URL.

Again, there is no obligation to blog about the wine. We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we do and of course you’re always welcome to send us feedback, post something on our blog, trackbacks, etc.

[Sept. 11th, 2006 - As of sometime last week we have reached our quota of bottles set aside for this offer. So at this time the offer has ended.

For all of those who have participated, we really hope you enjoyed the wine. There was a lot of good feedback from all of you and we really appreciate this. We are still following up on all the request e-mails so expect to hear from us if you sent us an e-mail.

Keep an eye on this blog, especially if you are a blogger, as in the future we might have other interesting offers for you.]