Press Releases

Caribbean Vineyards Wins Two Gold Addy Awards

St. Thomas, VI (May 13, 2008) - Caribbean Vineyards took home two prestigious marketing awards. The Virgin Islands wine company took home two Gold Addy Awards for product packaging for its Sea Spray Sauvignon Blanc and Red Sky Merlot wines.

The gala event was co hosted by David Carradine and took place March 15, 2008. The Addy awards are the world's largest advertising competition with over 60,000 entries annually. This is the first year that Caribbean Vineyards wines were eligible for awards.

Caribbean Vineyards is proud of the recognition and strong local support their wines are receiving and hopes these awards will for shadow extraordinary things to come in the future.

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Bellows International takes over sales of the Caribbean Vineyards wine.

St. Thomas, VI (Nov. 29, 2007) - During the summer of 2002, on the Island of St Thomas, a wager amongst two friends led to the creation of Caribbean Vineyards wines. Both Ansen Sligar and Scott Day shared a hobby of home wine making and they made a bet to determine who could produce the best wine made from locally grown fruits. The bet was simple, the loser had to hang his head and leave the island of St Thomas, never to return again. Sligar chose his favorite fruit the Mango and Day decided to use the Guava.

A few months later after fermentation, the wines were bottled. Scott and Ansen took a bottle each to six restaurateurs to judge and choose the best one. The positive feed back from the restaurants led to a last minute change in the bet. No longer would the loser have to leave paradise but he would have to purchase two commercial wine tanks for the winner. By the time the tanks showed up on a freighter from the states, Sligar and Day had formed Caribbean Vineyards.

They produced a few hundred bottles of both the original Mango and Guava wines. The wines were a success and quickly sold out in local restaurants. At this point Day and Sligar knew they had to turn to a larger, more commercial operation. They both shared a love of Chilean grapes and decided to begin production of more commercially recognized varieties of wines.

After a trip to Chile to search for a facility to handle the production volume the Virgin Islands demanded, the first year of Caribbean Vineyards Merlot and Sauvignon Blanc were bottled. Both Day and Sligar turned there attention to distributing to restaurants and stores in St Thomas and St John. These first year wines were a success and Virgin Islands distributor; Bellows International took over sales of the Caribbean Vineyards wine.

Since then, Scott and Ansen have produced a Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon bringing the label’s variety to four. The wines are distributed throughout St Thomas, St John, St Croix, and the British Virgin Islands. Over the years, the original bet has changed and the new version seems to be that Scott and Ansen bet you will not find a better bottle of wine then that of Caribbean Vineyards.

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