Leaning Post, 2017 Cabernet Franc, VQA Twenty Mile Bench, Ontario, Canada
Cab Franc du Jour #36
Leaning Post was founded in 2009 and is run by husband-and-wife team Ilya and Nadia Senchuk. Before founding Leaning Post, which began as a virtual winery, Ilya had spent well over a decade making wine at a number of different wineries across the Niagara region. His wines have consistently been among my favourites in the peninsula, and his focus on single-vineyard expressions across multiple varieties, from Chardonnay and Pinot to Riesling and beyond, reflects a genuine commitment to understanding and communicating terroir.
Today’s wine takes us to the Twenty Mile Bench VQA sub-appellation and more specifically to the Foxcroft Vineyard. We are on the Niagara Escarpment, with Lake Ontario to the north and the escarpment ridge to the south. The soils here were shaped around the time of the last Ice Age, approximately 12,000 years ago, as the glaciers receded, leaving behind the historic shoreline of the ancient Lake Iroquois that now defines the escarpment’s character.
Foxcroft Vineyard, owned and farmed by the Wismer family, is part of the Vineland Bench, one in a larger series of terraces that make up the Lake Iroquois Bench, ranging from a few hundred metres to around 2km in width depending on location. At this particular site, the subsoils are a base of dolomitic and argillaceous limestone and sandstone, with a clay-loam glacial till topsoil, essentially a mix of sand, silt, pebbles, and clay. Foxcroft is regarded as a high-quality site across a range of varieties. The Cabernet Franc block covers about 9 acres (3.5 hectares), planted in 1997 with Clone 327, the Bordeaux clone, at a moderate elevation of 130m on a gentle north-facing slope.
The wine was fermented in small open-top fermenters with indigenous yeast and manual punchdowns during fermentation, then aged for 20 months in a combination of French and American oak with around 40% new.
Wine Details
Producer: Leaning Post
Appellation: Twenty Mile Bench VQA
Region: Niagara Peninsula, ON
Vineyard: Foxcroft Vineyard
Soils: Clay-loam till over a subsoil of dolomite and argillaceous limestone and sandstone
Alcohol: 13.5%