X

Maple producers in St. Lawrence County confident ‘strange winter’ won’t stop syrup season

Posted 3/12/16

By CRAIG FREILICH Despite winter temperatures so warm maple sap was reported flowing in some southern St. Lawrence County locations in February, area maple producers say the sweet sap should come …

This item is available in full to subscribers.

Please log in to continue

Log in

Maple producers in St. Lawrence County confident ‘strange winter’ won’t stop syrup season

Posted

By CRAIG FREILICH

Despite winter temperatures so warm maple sap was reported flowing in some southern St. Lawrence County locations in February, area maple producers say the sweet sap should come through this spring nonetheless.

“I’m pretending like it hasn’t been a strange winter,” said veteran maple producer Donald Finen of Fine-n-Dandy in Norwood. “I’ve never seen a year when we didn’t have winter, and if you have winter, you’ll have spring,” and if it’s spring there will be a sap run.

So he’s confident in the end there will be some sort of sap run this spring.

Jeff Jenness of the Orebed Sugar Shack in DeKalb is on the same wavelength.

“The weather was odd with the way the fronts have been,” he said, noting wide temperature gradients over a small area.

At one point, while Cranberry Lake and Star Lake were on the warm side, some maplers had a chance to gather sap, but “here it was cold,” Jenness said, freezing him out.

Jenness believes that once a good sap run has started, “you can empty a tree soon enough, after about 24 hours. You’ll get the most out that you’re going to get.”

As maple sugar season preparations were getting underway in earnest last week, syrup producers were engaging in the annual guessing game of when the sap would flow freely, how much of it they might get, and how good it will be for producing their maple syrup and maple sugar and all the treats made from that.

If you ask how they think the season will turn out, you might get a cagey answer: “I’ll tell you in June,” said Finen, who is tapping about 1,000 trees with the increasingly popular vacuum tubing method in his Norwood sugarbush.

“I’m confident it will be all right,” he said.

Finen plans on improvising, as he does every year, because he and every other person who collects sap and boils it down is completely dependent on a range of daytime and nighttime temperatures in the spring when the sap will run. Some years require more shuffling of plans than others.

Finen’s son Jim Finen of Finen Maple Products in Norwood was waiting for the conditions to be right. The best sap production requires below-freezing temperatures overnight followed by a nice sunny and mild daytime, when “I’m going to have my hands full,” he said.

“It’s just been a weird winter. It was not really cold and there was not much snow. Last year we were up to our waists in snow.”

Donald Finen said he would not plan on trying to eke something out of small runs that might start under the right conditions but would soon be closed off by a spike or a drop in temperature.

“The small guy is not looking to be the first one out there getting sap. But if you have 10,000 trees, a short run will still get you a lot of sap. The bigger you are, the earlier you can start” with enough sap to make it worthwhile to fire up the evaporator, he said.

Meanwhile with his years in the sugarbush, Jenness has developed a gourmet’s delight in tasting syrup and connoisseur’s judgment in recommending what he likes.

It’s not for everybody, but he says he personally prefers the lighter syrups to the darker ones.

Most of us won’t reach his level of discernment and will be satisfied with the distinct flavor of real maple, but Jenness says he has developed a finer sense of the variability in maple syrup. “I taste it all the time,” he said.

“There are some 50 or so overtones” to the taste of maple syrup, much as there are with wines, he says – “cinnamon, caramel, coffee,” for instance.

“A dark syrup will have a stronger maple flavor,” not that there’s anything wrong with that, but “lighter syrup doesn’t block the overtones as much,” which he has come to enjoy very much.