by Douglas Whynott
Da Capo Press, 2014
When I was a kid, we stopped by neighboring sugarhouses a few times a year to pick up a gallon of Grade B. I’d hold the plastic jug in my lap on the ride home, and on a few of those lucky trips, the gallon was still warm to the touch.
Syrup seemed very expensive in Vermont in the mid-1970s – my Mom reminded me of it every time I tilted the jug towards my pancakes – but apparently the farmers weren’t able to earn a living making it. This is the kind of thing that makes no sense at all to a kid: how can something so good, and so expensive, not be a sure-fire way to earn a living?
The historical statistics tell the gloomy tale: maple production peaked in the United States at nearly seven million gallons in the 1860s, when every available sugar maple north of the Mason-Dixon Line was tapped to make table sugar. After the Civil War, production began to fall, and it continued to fall steadily for the next century until, by the 1980s, the total had sunk to below one million gallons. Fewer and fewer people were making a living in the sugarbush, with no reason to think the trend line was headed anywhere but down.
Which is why the present state of affairs is so surprising: sugaring is back. There’s a real chance that the old Civil War-era record might fall, if not next year, then likely before 2020. Canadian production is already six-fold greater than it was in the 1860s. The world is now producing and consuming more maple syrup than at any time in history. What, exactly, has happened?
“There is more to the maple industry than people realize,” says Bruce Bascom, in one of the more understated lines in the new book, The Sugar Season, by Douglas Whynott. Bascom should know: his farm in Acworth, New Hampshire – where, among other things, he sells maple sugaring equipment, sets more than 60,000 taps a year with his extended family, and engages in international syrup arbitrage – can hold about as much syrup in the warehouse basement as used to be produced in all of the United States in a typical year back in the 1970s.
The Sugar Season is likely to be an eye-opener, even for people conversant in things like vacuum releasers, check valve spouts, and the various other trappings of twenty-first century sugaring. Whynott focuses less on the new technology and more on the economic implications of that technology as he follows Bruce Bascom and his extended network of suppliers, associates, and middlemen through several sugaring seasons around the Northeast.
We meet the Harrison family in northern Vermont, who recently built a 100,000-tap sugarbush primarily as an investment vehicle. We meet David Marvin of Butternut Mountain Farm, one of Bascom’s biggest competitors, who also speculates on currency exchange rates and syrup futures. And we meet Robert Poirier, Bascom’s middleman along the Quebec-Maine border, who buys and transports many millions of dollars of syrup from along Maine’s Golden Road and Quecbec’s St. Aurelie region to the Bascom coolers in west-central New Hampshire.
All of this could become overly dry and technical, but Whynott, a New Hampshire-based journalist who teaches writing at Emerson College in Boston, does a lovely job of jumping back and forth between the arcane world of arbitrage and the many back-woods sugarhouses he drops by throughout the season, some with as few as a dozen taps. The juxtaposition reveals the essential nature of sugaring, which is that it transcends time and technology. Whether it’s Bruce Bascom on the phone with his international suppliers or Peter and Deb Roades, nearby neighbors who boil on an evaporator in continuous use since the 1930s, everyone is thinking about the same thing: what’s the weather going to do overnight, and what’s it looking like into next week.
Though The Sugar Season is in many ways a celebration of sugaring’s resurgence, Whynott doesn’t shy away from two problems looming on the horizon, one immediate and the other long-term. More immediately, sugaring’s resurgence has been powered by price-setting by the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, which controls the vast majority of the world market and which may be creating a price bubble and excess supply. In the longer term, the specter of climate change hangs over nearly every page of the book. The 2012 season, which Whynott chronicles in the book, had the warmest March since records started being kept, in 1895.
In the end, The Sugar Season is a great read for anyone with an interest in maple sugaring. I find myself thinking about it whenever I tip a quart of our home-made syrup over my pancakes. Will the all-time U.S. production record be broken in the next few years? Will the Yanks break up the Cartel Quebecois? Will Maine pass Vermont in overall production? Or will our grandchildren be hosting cherry-blossom festivals instead of sugar on snow? Stay tuned.