The Sugar Season

by Douglas Whynott

  After Robert told me his name I remembered seeing it before. I was in Bruce’s office once, early on, when he showed me an invoice from the Federation so I could see it as an example. Jacques’s name was there, and what made it easy to remember was the receipt for $236,000 worth of syrup.

  I have to say I was mesmerized by this man, his expressiveness and physical presence, and the melodic flow of his French, and I wanted badly to know what he was saying. Finally Robert turned to me and said, “He is owed two hundred thousand dollars by the Federation and they won’t pay.”

  “What percentage did they give?” I asked.

  “Seventy-five,” Jacques said. He went on in French. As he talked, Robert kept making little comments, and Jacques would laugh. Robert was enjoying making Jacques laugh.

  “You have lost weight,” Robert said.

  “It is hard eating two meals a day with the Federation,” Jacques said, and they laughed at this.

  After Jacques left and as I was about to leave for New Hampshire, Robert came out of his office with an ashen look on his face. He had talked to Bruce, who told him that he wasn’t going to pay the Federation, that he was going to wait. That he was out of money. “I will have to stop all the pickups,” Robert said. He seemed close to anger when he said, “I will talk to Bruce.”

  I wondered if Bruce was merely stressed with having to buy all that syrup, the many millions to spend.

  “No,” Robert said. “Bruce sleeps better when he has a problem. I tell him that. He has thick blood. Nothing worries him.”

  16

  THE ROUTE OF THE SUGARMAKERS

  AFTER I RETURNED to New Hampshire I called Robert. He said he had a long talk with Bruce and everything worked out. There was a problem with Federation invoices, the problem was solved, and now he could buy syrup again.

  I also had a long talk with Bruce. “The problem Robert doesn’t see is that the other two-thirds of my supply is coming from the US all the time,” he said. “Over the last thirty days we brought in four months’ worth of syrup. You’ve only got so much money to buy with. Right now I can’t buy more than sixteen to eighteen additional trailer loads.”

  Bruce went through the list of buyers in the United States who sent loads of syrup. Each cost about $120,000. A buyer in central New York, three trailer loads. Another buyer south of Buffalo, three loads, one left to go. Another in central New York, four loads. Another near Croghan, New York, west of the Adirondacks, seven loads. A buyer north of Croghan, two loads. A buyer from Swanton, Vermont, four loads. Another buyer from northwestern Vermont, three loads. The Vermont dairy farmer with 3000 cows, four loads. An Amish buyer from Ohio, five loads.

  Everyone was buying US syrup first because it cost less due to the Federation pricing and the exchange rate—it now cost US$1.04 to buy a Canadian dollar. I was given a chart by another processor that showed that during the summer of 2011 a pound of Federation syrup at $2.81 actually cost $2.92—eight percent more—because of the exchange rate.

  “Robert is highly successful at purchasing on the Canadian side, but I just don’t need all the tonnage he can obtain,” he said. “When I add up what I’m going to get in the US and what we’re getting in Maine I start to reach a point where I have enough syrup. I don’t want to carry additional syrup into the next year if I can help it. I want to go slow and extend my credit and buy syrup at the opportune time, which is now. I also want to start liquidating syrup in the fall and get the building empty so I don’t have syrup sitting around through the year. I want to have an empty building for what’s coming in next year.”

  Bruce said that the Federation surplus offered an advantage for processors like him. “There’s been so much expansion on both sides of the border that the probabilities are overwhelming as to whether there is going to be adequate supply or too much supply. Why should you buy ahead when everybody knows there’s a supply in the Federation? If someone gets caught short, they can always buy from the Federation. No one wants to pay their extra twenty-five cents per pound, but they will. With the Federation supply available, the tendency is for companies to go into the fall with a lean inventory.

  “Things have been skewed since the strategic reserve came into existence. One is that processors have no incentive to carry any more than the absolute minimum into the next year. It used to be that you made all kinds of deals to get enough supply to carry an inventory. What happens now is that you run your inventory down and the Federation gets stuck with theirs. If they’re stupid enough to do it, then you’re going to take advantage of it. It’s a fair world, right?”

  Not that Bruce wasn’t going to pay for all that Quebec syrup sitting in the warehouse in St. Zacharie. He was, he said—they were Robert’s suppliers, Bruce bought from them before, so he extended his loyalty to them. But he would be paying the Federation price, with the boost due to the exchange rate, plus $1400 more to ship each trailer load to Acworth.

  The costs rankled on him because they seemed out of touch with the markets in 2011, as they would again in 2012. “This year in Europe,” Bruce said in 2011, “prices are going up five percent because of the exchange rate. Yet there’s a bumper crop, there’s a surplus, and there’s almost a recession going on. It’s a stupid time to increase prices.”

  He added, “You go up too much, a little more Log Cabin gets sold.”

  A FEW DAYS LATER, when I returned to Quebec, I gave Robert a call from St. Georges, the city closest to St. Zacharie. He said if I came to the warehouse that afternoon, I could “see someone taste some sirop.”

  That someone happened to be a woman named Pascale Boivin, who led one of the inspection teams from Centre Acer, a company employed by the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers to test and grade syrup. There were eleven teams of graders testing the 2011 maple syrup crop in Quebec, all 101.9 million pounds of it.

  The team was working in the room reserved for the Centre Acer inspectors.

  When I arrived Ms. Boivin was sitting at a counter in front of a set of vials and some instruments. She was wearing a white coat, and her blond hair was tied up. Nearby, also wearing a white coat, was a young man, Alexandre Gregoire, recording data on a laptop. A third person was gathering samples from the warehouse, from the three long lines of barrels set aside for this day’s work.

  A fourth person was present, not in a white coat but in jeans and a plaid shirt, quietly sitting with his arms crossed like someone in a courtroom. His name was Cameron, and he was there to be a witness while his syrup and that of his two brothers was being graded—to make sure there was no funny business, I suppose.

  “Bonjour,” Pascale said when I took a chair beside her, and after a bit of talk she told me they were grading 250 barrels that day. She told me she tasted samples from 250 barrels of syrup every day. This seemed like a whole lot of sugar, and I asked how long she had been doing that. She conferred with Alexandre on pronunciation and said, “Nineteen ninety-four. I have been tasting since nineteen ninety-four. Seventeen years. Two hundred and fifty drums a day. I taste all the sirop. During the busy time.”

  I wondered if she disliked the taste of syrup, and that seemed an unfortunate occupational hazard. I asked, “Escu vous mange sirop?”

  She thought for a moment. “In the winter, sometimes, when I am not tasting, I eat sirop on, how do you say, crepes.”

  She conferred with Alexandre again, who said, carefully, “She doesn’t swallow.”

  “You spit it out,” I said. Which she did, into a container on the floor.

  The Centre Acer procedure seemed very detailed, though Pascale didn’t think so. They tested for brix, or concentration of sugar (which was at sixty-six or sixty-seven percent, as elsewhere), and for lumière, or light transmittance, using a spectrograph. That determined the grade. It was basically the same procedure as at Bascom’s, except for the more precise test for brix. After the two tests Pascale smelled the syrup, then tasted it, then spit.

  “Soixante-huit,” she said of the light transmitta
nce of one of the Cameron samples. “Soixante-neuf,” of another. Seventy-eight and seventy-nine, both A light grade. Alexandre keyed in the data for the appropriate barrels.

  At one point I went out into the warehouse to look at the barrels they were grading. A worker named Bruno Guay was helping the woman who was taking the samples, opening the bungs with a wrench. I said to him, “There are two hundred and fifty barrels here?” “No,” he said. “There are two hundred and fifty-three.” He smiled at this and said some graders got upset when there were more than 250 barrels, but sometimes it just worked out that way. Bruno said the Centre Acer crew arrived at 8:00 that morning, started grading at 9:00, tasted 136 barrels in the morning and would taste 127 this afternoon. He smiled at this too—so much tasting.

  They finished the Cameron syrup, and Monsieur Cameron quietly departed. They then moved to the final twenty-six barrels, which happened to be Robert Poirier’s 2011 crop. The first, Pascale said, “quatre-vingts cinq,” an eighty-five, an exceptional A light, though because it was the first barrel of the year, it had a bit of an off-flavor—first-run off-flavor, this was called. The next one tasted very good.

  “Sirop good today,” Boivin said.

  Of course I had to ask. “Have you tasted bad syrup?”

  “I have tasted a lot of bad sirop. In July, August, a lot of bad sirop.”

  It ferments, she said, or sometimes accumulates mold—“moisi.” Or it can be buddy—“bourgeon.”

  They worked through Robert’s barrels over the next hour and reached number 253. The feeling then in the room seemed to be joyous, as they stood and removed their white coats and began to relax. I went to where Alexandre was attaching labels to the barrels, pulling them from a portable printer. Every barrel of Federation syrup was labeled with a serial number, the brix, the lumière, the grade, and other identifying information. Data about the work of each grader was also on the labels. In this case, on the last barrel of Poirier syrup, the number for Pascale Boivin was 8922. We went right over to her. She was letting down her hair. We asked if that was a correct number—this hardly seemed possible. Pascale said no, it was not correct. The computer crashed twice this year and been replaced, and she actually graded—she conferred with Alexandre again:

  “Ten thousand drums this year,” she said.

  “Au revoir.” Before they departed, Bruno Guay was lining up another 250 drums.

  THE NEXT DAY Robert told me I was going to see the most beautiful sugarhouse in St. Zacharie. He needed to stay at the warehouse to load a trailer for shipment to Acworth, but he said someone would take me there, a man named Jean-Claude Pare, who ran an érablière called Dole Pond Maple Products. He was a gregarious man, happy to practice his English and talk about the maple syrup industry, especially about that segment of French Canadians who sugared on the American side of the border.

  There were forty-three of them in all, Jean-Claude told me. They averaged 30,000 taps each, and possessed about 1.3 million taps in all. Their output made Somerset County, Maine, the top-producing county in the United States. When we went to Jean-Claude’s house we looked at the website of the Maine Maple Producers Association, where the group he belonged to was described as the “Bulk Syrup Suppliers that proudly operate sugarhouses in the State of Maine.” They were members of the Maine Somerset County Sugarmakers Association, but Jean-Claude had also founded an organization of the French Canadians called the Alligash Group, which worked together to make certain they continued to get the E2 visas necessary to work on the US side of the border.

  Jean-Claude had been making syrup in a camp near the Golden Road for twenty years. He started with very little money in 1991, working up his sugarbush, getting to 16,000 taps, and made his first good crop in 1995. Now Jean-Claude was at 37,000 taps. He and his wife worked together and hired a worker to check tubing. Finding the right people to check for leaks was difficult. “We must be ‘minuteaux,’ how do you say, fussy? To find the ‘microfuite,’ we call it, the little leaks.”

  The sugarhouse we went to was near the border, but on the Canadian side, and on government land. We traveled along some back roads, and Jean-Claude showed me some wooded land he bought—“It makes us proud here, to own land.” He pulled off the road by a field and pointed to a long hill about a mile away. “See out there, you see the maples?” Then suddenly I could—a large monochromatic patch of maple green on the hillside.

  The road into the woods was called “Route de Sucriers,” the Road of the Sugarmakers. Jean-Claude said his own sugar camp was not very far away, on the other side of this hill in Maine. This side, however, which faced to the southeast, was warmer—by four degrees on average, Jean-Claude said. As a result, the sugarhouses here produced more syrup on average, three and a half pounds per tap, nearly a third of a gallon.

  There were sugarhouses and camps all along the way. I waved to one man I saw in front of a cabin, who looked at me strangely—Jean-Claude told me you don’t wave to someone around here unless you know them. We passed a sign that read, “Claude Giroux—Acericulteur.” A maple culturist. It seemed to be the profession of choice in St. Zacharie.

  “To buy sugarhouses in these areas is very expensive,” Jean-Claude said. “Fifteen to twenty dollars per tap.” So a 20,000-tap operation would be $300,000 to $400,000. “For private sugarbushes in Quebec it is much, much more. Fifty to sixty dollars per tap. It’s crazy because the syrup cannot pay for it.” That meant that in Quebec a 20,000-tap sugarbush on private land would cost up to $1.2 million. And that 165,000-tap operation that Robert talked about—up to $9.9 million at $60 per tap. Jean-Claude said that the camps had always been held closely and passed down within families, but now “strangers” were coming in to buy them.

  At the end of the road we turned into a driveway where we came to the sugarhouse owned by a man named Vital Lariviere. Jean-Claude drove around to the south end of the building to a wall built to take advantage of sunlight, with fourteen door-sized windows—seven on the first floor and seven above. A very nice thing on a March day in Quebec, I imagined. The building, I am guessing, was thirty feet wide and eighty feet long. It was sided with natural pine, with small windows on the long sides of the building and, above, a red metal roof.

  Off to the side was Lariviere’s old sugarhouse. It was quite small and didn’t take advantage of sunlight. Lariviere must have looked at the site of his new sugarhouse for many winters. Jean-Claude said, “He worked in there for years and thought about all the things he wanted in a sugarhouse. When he built this he put them all in.”

  No one was there, so we drove up to the sugarbush to look for Lariviere. We passed by a machine, a wood processor that he used to cut his firewood. By using only wood for heat instead of oil, Jean Claude said, Lariviere saved enough money to pay for his living expenses. As we followed the road we passed a stack of firewood that must have been a quarter-mile long, trailing down the road and out of sight. Along the edge of the woods were mainlines. We stopped at a pump-house, looked inside, and saw the pumps and a video camera trained on them.

  Jean-Claude called Lariviere, who said that it was too hot to work in the woods, so he was lying by his pool but that we could go inside and have a look around. Jean-Claude drove back to the south end.

  Through that entryway was a kitchen with a round wooden dining table with four chairs and, on the refrigerator, photos of Lariviere and his children, teenagers. Mounted on a wall was a row of video monitors, one for watching television and the others for watching pumps. Off the kitchen was a room for drying wet clothing. A beautifully tooled stairway led up to the bedrooms.

  Beyond the kitchen was the sugarhouse, and the first impression was one of space, open space and lots of room. There was a tool bench, well organized, along one wall—he must have been thinking about that tool bench while working in that other cramped sugarhouse. The evaporator was large, six feet wide and eighteen feet long, but not fancy. The pans were removed, and some ash was still in the arch. The evaporator wasn’t in the cente
r of the room but instead off to the side. Above it was a box-shaped chimney, paneled in pine, wider and longer than the evaporator—the purpose must have been to channel as much steam as possible through the upper vents. On the outer paneling was affixed a garden hose, cleverly threaded through a bicycle wheel, with counterweights attached so that the hose could easily be pulled down and put to use.

  “Vital is willing to try new things and experiment,” Jean-Claude said.

  The R.O. room was in a back corner, nothing special to look at, just another typical room with tubes and pipes and dials. Next to it a stairway led up to a balcony with tanks for holding sap, both raw and concentrated.

  In most sugarhouses the evaporator sat center stage, but that was not the case at Vital’s place. In the middle of this sugarhouse, sitting on a raised platform, was a large spa for hot water baths—what more could you ask for after working in the snowy woods, checking tubing on a winter day or after boiling sap for many hours? I remembered someone telling me that hot maple syrup fresh off the evaporator and a little whiskey was a very good drink, though that was my fantasy, not theirs. Based on this tool of enjoyment and other innovations, I now understood why Robert thought this was the most beautiful sugarhouse in St. Zacharie.

  On our way out along the Route of the Sugarmakers Jean-Claude said, “Around here everyone talks about sirop. You go into the store and they talk about sirop d’erable, and at the restaurants they talk about sirop. Everybody does it, everybody talks about it here.”

  17

  SEASONS OF CHANGE

  BY SATURDAY, MARCH 17, the sap run was down to a quarter of the amount of a week ago and the sugar content down to a range of about 1.2 to 1.5 percent at the Bascom lots. Bruce was at the store that Saturday.