Can sugarmakers make more money by better understanding and marketing the geology, geography, practice, and tradition and how it creates good and unique flavors in maple syrup?
Excerpt from the book “A Taste of Place” by Amy Trubek, Chair and Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences at the University of Vermont, published 2008
Beyond Brand to Taste of Place
Is it possible that maple syrup, like the wines of Burgundy and the cheeses of Savoie, possesses a taste of the land (taste of place)? More than a century ago the naturalist John Burroughs eloquently wrote of the unique taste of maple syrup, “when made in small quantities- that is, quickly from the first run of sap and properly treated- it has a wild delicacy of flavor that no other sweet can match. What you smell in freshly cut maple wood, or taste the blossom of the tree, is in it. It is then, indeed, the distilled essence of the tree.”
What a shame that this “wild delicacy of flavor” has been made standard, more relating on color than a result of place. Are producers of Vermont maple syrup missing an opportunity to valorize the taste of place more thoroughly, to examine closely the variation in flavors of maple syrup made in the state, and ultimately to link the taste of maple syrup to processes and place? days of my research into terroir in the United States I thought about maple syrup often, but my focus was on wine and cheese, so my musings never went very far.
Two years ago, however, I got into a conversation with John Elder, and environmentalist writer and English professor who also happens to have a sugarbush in Starksboro, near where I live. He asked me about the taste of place, with which he had become familiar while he spent time in Tuscany with olive growers. He wanted to explore the geology and geography of his sugarbush, to look for a link between his location in Starksboro and the taste of his Maggie Brook maple syrup. Our initial meeting, a casual conversation over coffee, turned into a more sustained debate about what the taste of place can mean in the rural, agricultural state of Vermont, a dialogue between a conservationist and a trained chef who also happens to research and teach and so perhaps inevitably we have begun a collaborative research project on the taste of place and Vermont Maple syrup.