Terroir is a mystical, magical concept. Like many French words, it has no powerful English equivalent with which to express its full meaning, but basically it comes down to all the things that make a plant do what a plant does best: react to its environment. This includes weather and climate, soil, etc. In the case of Vitis Vinifera, a.k.a. the wine grape, things are obviously extremely complex due to human intervention in cultivating numerous forms down through centuries of loving manipulation. Various species of maple (and by extension, other possible syrup friendly trees), in contrast, at least our North American trees, have not nearly been selectively bred to the same extent that wine grapes have. That said, we do have a small assortment of species to choose from in the syrup game, and also said, we find that nature is remarkable in that has long produced variations within species without our help. In part, this is because terroir has affected our leafy friends in such a way that trees are likely to have some small variations in form and resulting taste even when sampled from neighboring areas. A Sugar Maple (Acer Saccharum) from central Tennessee would find itself facing a rather brutal winter if it were to find itself suddenly in Quebec, to say nothing of what the same shock would be like for a Red Maple (Acer Rubrum), a far more generally adaptable species, suddenly finding itself no longer in the swamps of Southern Florida but among the shorelines of the Ottawa River.
This sort of stuff gets commercial tree growers in trouble quite a bit, especially where more tender temperate ornamental trees like the Eastern Redbud (Cercis Canadensis) are concerned. One of the most obvious differences in terroir felt by a nursery grown tree from the South and imported into Le Nord would be the new and strange frigid winter that the tree would find itself trying to be hardy to. Likewise, the tree would find that Le Nord is not nearly as hot in the summer as it was back South, to say nothing of how much less humid and rainy! Finally, it would also find that the soil was so very, very different from what it grew up in. I could go on and on about terroir, or Phytogeography, which is pretty much what the core of this blog is about, but...
The maples!
Most maples are creatures of the forest, and thus are very fond of mixed-light conditions and moisture, moisture, and more moisture. With the exception of the aloof, adaptable, and mysterious Box Elder (Acer Negundo), none of our temperate eastern maples are courageous enough to venture far into the drier prairie lands, and the Red Maple will not even make it very far into the eastern prairies of Illinois or Indiana, being completely afraid to face the possibility of drought combined with fire, which is another reason why I probably found even the thought of central Illinois syrup to be funny (to be fair, Sugar Maples and Black Maples are apparently made of tougher stuff and can indeed be found in forested patches there). Sure, the maples can be planted further afield from their comfortable natural ranges, but they might not produce enough starch in their roots to make syrup production viable. Syrup production in most places was not the best in the March of 2013, owing to the colossal hot, drought-heavy summer that was 2012. The brunt of that disaster was felt in the True Midwest, but trees were sufficiently stressed in all but northern New England. Rocky, sandy, well-drained northern Ontario and neighboring western Quebec and northern Michigan baked and dried to a crisp. Massive forest fires made life even more difficult.
That year, Vermont won the award.
Thankfully, most of the time the inland north does better. Why? A little thing called maritime, or oceanic influence.
The most powerful maritime climates in the world are usually envisioned as being temperate western Europe, the Pacific Northwest, etc., but a typical cold January day even in chilly Nova Scotia is decidedly more moderate of a chill than one would find farther inland, even New Brunswick and Maine. Champlain and friends discovered this first hand when their colony of Saint Croix was established in a very chilly position, and soon made way to the other side of the Bay of Fundy where they established the roots of future Acadia in what is now Nova Scotia. Saint Croix was on the "inland" side of the bay, gaining no benefit from the prevailing westerlies which would skim the mostly unfrozen waters, pick up moisture, and moderate the winter chill. Still, even Saint Croix is much more mild than places further inland, such as the St. Lawrence valley. The ocean, westerlies or not, is like a giant road block for intense continental chill. New England, as a result, is a tropical paradise compared to neighboring Quebec and upstate New York.
That said, the same can be noted for upstate New York in comparison to Michigan and southern Ontario, and then Michigan in comparison to Wisconsin. The Great Lakes, you see, have a small amount of maritime influence of their own.
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| Public domain, see the original at http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap041130.html. |
The above picture features a north western wind, but the overall effect remains the same: downwind of the lakes one gets moderated temperatures and a ton of moisture. In the summer, this sometimes has a reverse effect of creating something like a coastal California marine layer, wherein the water and shoreline areas are under heavy cloud while inland the place is delightfully sunny. In any event, even smaller bodies of water can influence climate, with an unfrozen Lake St. Clair providing small scale changes to the local climate. The larger lakes, though, are truly things of raw climactic power. Superior creates its own weather systems! Well, she does until she manages to largely freeze over. The lake effect runs to a screeching halt once the bodies get a coat of ice. A total coat is rare for all but Erie, but enough of the surface area gets frozen in places like Georgian Bay, western Superior, and the Straits of Mackinac, that winter does come and the true maritime influence disappears. The result for the local terroir in places like northern Michigan, the Adirondacks, and the Opeongo Hills section (Algonquin highlands) of the Laurentian Mountains is the best of both worlds; New England meets Boreal.
Like in the deserts of the western United States and Canada and northern Mexico, elevation rise is the second factor in enhancing this climate soup. As air rises on the Porcupine, Adirondack, or Laurentian mountains or onto the Mio Plateau, all of which are significant rises above the surrounding lowlands (a change of at least a thousand feet in many places), it cools if even ever so slightly, and dumps out moisture. In each of these locations, a slight rain-shadow is even created. The most noticeable of these is in the central Ottawa valley of Ontario, where Jack-Pine savannas and cacti can be found. Like in the desert sky-islands out west, the Opeongo portion of the Laurentian mountains contrast this scenery with moist spruce-hardwood forests, replete with maritime expectations like Red Spruce (Picea Rubens) and Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga Canadensis), well west of their happy Appalachian strongholds. Then of course there are the maples, benefiting both from the same moisture, and the final ingredient of terroir: recycled life and powerful organic soil (and on the Mio plateau and in the Laurentians, glacially deposited sand an loam to assist in drainage). Powerful for trees, anyway. Farming never took off in any of these mountain lands, confined instead to nearby clay belts in the surrounding lowlands. The end result is a logging paradise, and more so, a maple syrup dream, the moisture of the Appalachians with the winters of the interior (sorry Vermont, you are just close enough to oceanic protection to make the slight difference for the pickiest syrup-enthusiast), perfect for feeding a tree and then keeping the food locked away from pesky winter thaws. When that sap starts to run, it really runs.
In review, the best sort of syrup (and remember, that local soil can make you even pickier) comes from here:
And yes, x does indeed mark the spot of syrup in its Platonic form, but that is just my opinion regarding the finest terroir. What can I say? Those Canadian Shield minerals are just amazing. Next post, we will start looking at individual trees, and we will cap off with individual products. And before I get any letter-bombs sent to me from the Green Mountain state, Vermont syrup is fine. Honest.
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