Where's the Sap

If you’ve spent any time at all in Northern New England, you know that the weather here is, to be nice about it, unpredictable. You can make conscientious preparations, experience a sudden shift in the weather, and watch your carefully formulated plans fail faster than Great Aunt Fannie’s girdle on Thanksgiving Day. Just now I welcomed a couple from Texas who came to Vermont specifically for sugaring season. “We’ve been here 8 days and we’ve seen some of the process (of maple sugaring), but we weren’t able to watch them gathering sap” explained my visitor in his manly Texan drawl.  A couple from New Jersey came in a few minutes later, lamenting in a similar fashion.

The sugaring season got off to a robust start this year, our Vermont sugarmakers huffing and puffing through heavy snow as they tapped their trees and hung their buckets or set their lines for the collection of the clear, liquid sap of the Vermont sugar maple tree.  March came in like a lamb, offering our winter-weary souls temperate days and chilly nights, the kind of weather that encourages the trees to give up some of their precious sap store to the hard working folks who make pure, golden Vermont maple syrup by boiling down this precious sap. But faster than a sixth-grade boy can launch a spit wad at his teacher’s back, March gave us the cold shoulder, sending us days too cold for the sap to run. Oh, he felt a little twinge of conscience and sent fine weather for the Vermont maple sugar house open weekend.  (In fact my friends Doug and Barb Bragg of Bragg Farm said they had better than 1000 people visit that weekend and treat themselves to sugar on snow, a Vermont tradition in which syrup is further reduced (boiled down) so that it coalesces into a chewy, gooey, scrumptious taffy-like wonder when it is delicately poured atop a small mound of snow or shaved ice. Traditionally this amazing confection is eaten along with a an unsweetened raised donut and a bite of pickle, historically a sour pickle, but I’ve seen some folks offer a dill pickle that served the purpose of “cutting the sweet” of the taffy-syrup just as well.  In fact, my friend Burr Morse, a seventh-generation maple sugarmaker, mentioned in a TV interview last week that of all the places in the US and Canada that serve sugar-on-snow, Vermont is the only place, to his knowledge, where the traditional serving of a pickle is still observed. ) But soon March’s remorse faded and he sent the cold days back to us once more. By the weekend after the open house weekend, hardly any sap was flowing at all. And it’s been that way ever since.

Now I fancy myself a true Vermonter in many respects, but I confess I am yearning for some warmer days and am hoping April will be more than a trifle more generous with the sunshine than old stingy March has been. And I’m wishing all of the great Vermont sugarmakers a banner year with some warm days and chilly nights to entice that sap to fill vacuum lines and buckets throughout this great state.

http://www.vermontmaple.org/

Todd Paton has more than 20 years of experience working in the Vermont tourism industry. Currently the Director of Visitor Services for Rock of Ages, one of Vermont's oldest, continuously operating attractions, he has served on the board of directors of the Central Vermont Chamber and the Vermont Hospitality Council. He is an active member of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce and the Vermont Tourism Network. He is a past Chair and current member of the board of directors of Vermont Attractions Association, a consortium of Vermont attractions established in 1956 to promote the highest standards of hospitality among Vermont's tourism-related properties.