March has ushered in the first hints of spring. The days are sunny, the nights cold, and that means the sap is running. Unbroken forests of sugar maple and black maple once blanketed much of eastern Canada and northeastern United States. When the first European settlers arrived in the 1600s, they discovered the Indians of the region harvested sap from maple trees to sweeten their diet.
During the early, warming days of spring, the Indians cut diagonal slashes along the trunks of mature maple trees and inserted hollow reeds into the cuts. The sap dripped down the reed into a birch-bark container; it was then boiled down into a thick syrup. One taste of maple syrup - which has a distinctive, indescribable and unforgettable flavour - will make a convert out of anyone with a sweet tooth.
Today's syrup producers tap their maples by drilling a hole deep into the tree and inserting a spigot. The wound doesn't seem to be harmful: trees are safely harvested of their sap, year after year, for decades. The sap runs into flexible tubing - which is connected to many other trees - and flows through a main line to what producers call their 'sugar shack'. There, the sap is boiled in large, stainless-steel tanks.
Many producers earn extra income by opening their shacks - most of which are located deep in the forest - to the public. Visitors can feast on pancakes with syrup or purchase jugs of fresh syrup, maple candy and maple butter. A spring visit to a sugar shack is almost a rite of spring in this part of Canada. And if you can't make it to the forest, markets and grocery stores carry the new season's syrup in every manner and size of container.
Although maple syrup is produced in half a dozen American states, Canada dominates the market: well more than 80 per cent of the world's supply flows from trees here. Canada's 23 million litre crop last year generated sales of C$175 million ($1.16 billion).
Syrup is not a huge industry but it's a historic one, and currently in a bit of a crisis - especially in the province of Quebec, which accounts for more than 80 per cent of Canadian production. The province is sitting on warehouses full of barrels of surplus syrup, because world demand has not kept up with production. Bulk sales are handled by a provincial marketing board, which has been slowly selling off the surplus. Producers are being paid to stop making syrup, and others have been obliged to cut production by 25 per cent.