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A Year in the Life of Maple Syrup, and One Family?s Quest for the Sweetest Harvest
Da Capo Press
March 2014
On Sale: March 4, 2014
300 pages
ISBN: 0306822040
EAN: 9780306822049
Kindle: B00FD36G5C
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
A year in the life of one New England family as they work to
preserve an ancient, lucrative, and threatened agricultural
art--the sweetest harvest, maple syrup...
How has one
of America's oldest agricultural crafts evolved from a
quaint enterprise with "sugar parties" and the delicacy
"sugar on snow" to a modern industry?
At a sugarhouse
owned by maple syrup entrepreneur Bruce Bascom, 80,000
gallons of sap are processed daily during winter's end. In
The Sugar Season, Douglas Whynott follows Bascom
through one tumultuous season, taking us deep into the
sugarbush, where sunlight and sap are intimately related and
the sound of the taps gives the woods a rhythm and a ring.
Along the way, he reveals the inner workings of the
multimillion-dollar maple sugar industry. Make no mistake,
it's big business--complete with a Maple Hall of Fame, a
black market, a major syrup heist monitored by Homeland
Security, a Canadian organization called The Federation, and
a Global Strategic Reserve that's comparable to OPEC
(fitting, since a barrel of maple syrup is worth more than a
barrel of oil).
Whynott brings us to sugarhouses,
were we learn the myriad subtle flavors of syrup and how
it's assigned a grade. He examines the unusual biology of
the maple tree that makes syrup possible and explores the
maples'--and the industry's--chances for survival,
highlighting a hot-button issue: how global warming is
threatening our food supply. Experts predict that, by the
end of this century, maple syrup production in the United
States may suffer a drastic decline.
As buckets and
wooden spouts give way to vacuum pumps and tubing, we see
that even the best technology can't overcome warm nights in
the middle of a season--and that only determined men like
Bascom can continue to make a sweet like off of rugged land.
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