Tasting Note This is not your typical soft, rounded, fruity and floral gamay. In fact, it is quite intense and almost bold, a trait of Leaning Post wines. Hailing from the mature Heubel Vineyard in the Four Mile Creek appellation of Niagara-on-the-Lake, it is firm, edgy and complex. It pours with fairly deep ruby colour. The nose is generous with flinty, peppery and slightly meaty notes around cranberry and raspberry fruit, with a light touch of oak spice. It is medium bodied, firm and slightly sour-edged, with fine tannin. It finishes with a sense of minerality. The length is excellent. This was released LCBO Vintages stores March 21, 2026 and remained in good supply as of publication here April 17.
Backgrounder Winnipegger Ilya Senchuk had been making wine in Niagara for several years before he and his wife and business partner, Nadia, purchased an old farmhouse and barn in Winona in 2011 and, with gusto, grew Leaning Post into one of Niagara’s most cherished and consistently excellent wineries. Like others, including Thomas Bachelder, Ilya has focused on chardonnay and pinot noir sourced from good sites along the Peninsula, including his own maturing Senchuk site. But Leaning Post also makes Bordeaux varieties, syrah and this gamay. Senchuk calls 2024 — with its very warm, sunny growing season and cooler September —“phenomenal for gamay,” allowing his wine to build great intensity and ripeness with moderate alcohol (13%). Hand-picked in late September, the grapes were cold soaked six days prior to fermentation in concrete, then left five days after fermentation (lots of extraction) before being gently pressed and settled and racked into to older barrels to be aged for nine months.
