The Sugar Season (35 page)

“The only reason it hasn’t dropped is because of Federation support in Canada. But at some point, I keep saying this over and over, they won’t be able to control it because the Americans will be making too much syrup. It’s the same old song—eventually supply and demand comes into play, and you’ve got to sell the stuff. The biggest thing in the maple industry in the future is going to be sales and marketing, getting people to buy it. Always has been, always will be.”

In what may have been a counterdevelopment, the exchange rate had made a dramatic shift over the last three weeks in favor of the US dollar, and Canadian syrup was now cheaper than US syrup. “But it’s too late for me,” Bruce said. “I’ve spent most of my capital.” Bascom’s had taken in forty-nine trailer loads in May, with six trailer loads in a day and a half in June. A couple had yet to arrive—loads pieced together by Michael Parker west of Lake Champlain and Erwin Gingerich in Ohio. Bruce now had 6 million pounds stored away.

I wanted to know if the bulk supply in the United States had all been purchased, as Bruce had predicted those many times.

“There are some people holding or speculating, but most are holding for their own markets. They need syrup for fall foliage or some for Christmas for their stores. But I would say that ninety-five percent of the bulk syrup in the United States is gone. There are no complete loads now anywhere in the United States.”

Yet there would be plenty of supply available, thanks to the Canadians. “The real cold areas made a lot of syrup during that cold spell when we were done,” Bruce said. “Everybody
stopped here around March twenty, gave up the ghost and pulled the spouts, but up north a couple hundred miles they waited it out and made quite a lot of syrup.

“We had the worst sugaring season I’ve ever seen. We broke records in the middle of March and then we were done by March twenty. There have been years when we haven’t made hardly any syrup until March twenty, but this year we were totally done. The season basically lasted ten days. I don’t know anybody who has documented a sugar season that’s as bad. It got up to seventy and eighty degrees for almost three weeks. In the middle of March the tadpoles were out in the pond in front of the sugarhouse. They don’t usually come out until the fifteenth to the twentieth of April, but this time they were out on the twentieth of March. And then we had that real cold spell, and it did them all in.”

The USDA report was issued a week after Bruce and I talked. The maple syrup crop in the United States in 2012 was 20,988,000 pounds, or 1,908,000 gallons. Bruce’s prediction wasn’t so far off after all, and perhaps it was only the expansion in the United States that caused him to underestimate by a million pounds. The report from the Federation followed. The crop in Quebec was 96,110,000 pounds, made by 7400 producers.

I
ALSO VISITED
David Marvin in June, and we walked in the sugarbush at Butternut Mountain. Production at David’s sugarhouse was consistent with that of northern Vermont. After shutting down during the hot weather, when they had dumped sap because it looked like cottage cheese, they began producing again on April 4 after the weather turned
cold. The syrup lightened and then darkened again. Butternut Mountain produced nearly 4000 gallons.

Technology had accommodated them, and what David suspected turned out to be true: “We learned things about how to adjust to temperature and that we can have sap runs on temperature differentials with high vacuum.” But there were limitations. “Technology won’t overcome warm nights in the middle of the season,” he said. Warm nights caused the buds to develop, and when the buds swelled, the sap turned buddy. In David’s experience in 2012, every barrel produced after March 19 had a buddy flavor.

“Everything?” I asked.

“Everything. There was a lot of buddy syrup, and now we have to decide what to do with that. In the future, when we have these warm periods, we will have to find markets for buddy syrup.” One way to use it was to make sugar, as the buddy flavor disappeared during the process, but the dry sugar market could not absorb all the buddy syrup in 2012.

David also had concerns about expansion in the industry. “I’ve heard of an investor who wants to buy a three-million-dollar property in northern Vermont and have a hundred-thousand tap operation in which he will haul sap sixty miles over a mountain. That tells me the industry is expanding.” Which meant that they needed more markets. “You can say you’ll increase the markets, but the markets should be increased first.”

Interest in sugaring hadn’t diminished. “What is it that they say about farmers: when the going gets tough, the tough get growing? Capital is going into maple. Dairy farmers and others are investing. It’s a bright spot.”

David laughed at the irony that, from his perspective, “This was a perfect season. If it was another big year, there
would have been too much syrup and a downward pressure on prices.” He would have bought the total crops from all of his 375 producers, and they too were expanding.

Of course, David was expanding too. His new building was nearing completion. While we walked up the road in the sugarbush, by the Cherry Corner and by the boulder where there were brick fragments from an arch of a century ago, David said Bruce was no longer in the second tier, that he was at the level of Maple Grove.

“And we will soon be too,” David said.

D
URING THE SUMMER
of 2012 events were taking place that made the maple syrup industry a world story. Those stories didn’t break until the end of the year, with the arrests of suspects in Canada for the theft of 6 million pounds of syrup from a Federation warehouse in Saint-Louis-de-Blandford, north of Montreal. The Federation had been renting the warehouse to store surplus from the 2011 crop while they built a third facility of their own.

The discovery of the theft was made on July 30, when an auditor hired to examine the supply found empty barrels and barrels filled with water. The Federation reported the theft to the Sûreté du Québec, the provincial police, and a wide investigation followed, with interviews of nearly 300 people, tracing the syrup to companies in Quebec, New Brunswick, Ontario, and the United States.

The investigation led to a company named SK Export in Kedgwick, New Brunswick. A sugarmaker named Etienne St. Pierre had started the business in 2002 and focused his marketing plan on Quebec syrup, believing that the Federation
rules didn’t apply to him in New Brunswick. He ran advertisements in Quebec, promising confidentiality. In the beginning he sold primarily to Maple Grove, later branching out to other companies, including Bascom’s. The Federation had been battling with St. Pierre over the years, running undercover investigations and demanding that he pay damages, but he had ignored them.

Most of the stories played upon the surprising fact that there was such a thing as a global strategic reserve for maple syrup. The word “cartel” was often used, with comparisons to OPEC, pointing out that a barrel of maple syrup was worth more than a barrel of oil. The stories described sticky-fingered thieves and hot syrup. A hilarious story aired on
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,
a comic sketch that likened the Federation to a drug cartel and maple syrup to cocaine—an innocent reporter tried maple syrup, despite his reservations, then followed a path of addiction and crime, stooping even to sucking sap out of tapholes, so hopelessly caught up in the pursuit of syrup that he missed getting the big story.

A story with some equally funny but true moments appeared in
Bloomberg Businessweek
under the title, “The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist.” This story, written by Brendan Borrell, described the dispute between Etienne St. Pierre and the Federation and how St. Pierre’s salty assistant, Julienne Bosse, took a more confrontational approach than merely ignoring demands: “She scribbled her response on a subpoena and faxed it back to the Federation. ‘F—you gang of A-holes,’ she wrote. ‘Ha! Ha! Ha! . . . We will keep buying maple syrup forever.’” In another communication, after the Federation used a wrong address for SK Export, she corrected them by writing, “7348 Rue Funck You.” When officers
from the Sûreté du Québec arrived in September 2012 with a search warrant, Bosse “pretended to wipe her derriere with it, gave the police the bird, and locked the side door.” This loyal employee grabbed the keys to the warehouse from St. Pierre and “tucked them into her ample bosom.” All this, Borrell wrote, while also making chocolate maple leaves and “melt-in-your-mouth maple meringues for sale in the gift shop.”

Later that day, after a visit to a judge, according to Borrell, police pried open the warehouse doors and found a million dollars worth of syrup. Everything was seized the following day, including St. Pierre’s forklift and his list of suppliers and customers. He told police that many of the barrels came from a man named Richard Vallieres, “one of Quebec’s most notorious ‘barrel rollers,’ an unauthorized middleman who ran afoul of the Federation in the past and paid thousands of dollars in fines.” On December 18 Vallieres was arrested and charged with conspiring with five others to steal the syrup. In all, twenty-two suspects were charged, including St. Pierre.

The story went on to say a Quebec television station reported that “at least 70 truckloads of stolen syrup have already made it to three distributors in the U.S., including Bascom Maple Farms in New Hampshire, one of St. Pierre’s clients and the largest maple supplier in the U.S. Bruce Bascom says he fully cooperated with the Sûreté du Québec and they have ended their inquiries, but he declined to answer whether the company had purchased any stolen syrup. Two Vermont companies that reportedly purchased the syrup, Maple Grove Farms and Highland Sugarworks, did not respond to requests for interviews.”

Many other news stories reported the arrests, including the arrest of a man named Stephan Darveau, who sold syrup to Highland Sugarworks and to Bruce Bascom.

After reading the
Bloomberg Businessweek
story in January I went to talk with Bruce. He was about to leave for the maple conference in Verona, and Sam and David were waiting in the car, but Bruce talked for a little while. He said that during the summer the Sûreté du Québec came to speak with him, along with an official from Homeland Security, because the syrup crossed the international border. “I bought a lot of syrup from Darveau,” Bruce said, “but I had no idea it was stolen syrup. Darveau said he didn’t know, either.” He said he also bought syrup from SK Export.

“Maple Grove had loads that they have to return or are contesting returning. Highland has some too. But we don’t have any. It’s been sold. All that syrup is in people’s stomachs.”

Regarding Bruce’s statement about Maple Grove, on May 2, 2013, the
Montreal Gazette
reported that the Sûreté du Québec and Vermont police visited the Maple Grove factory with search warrants on October 19, 2012. Maple Grove allegedly purchased multiple truckloads of stolen syrup. According to the report the company representative confirmed that the firm had bought syrup from Richard Vallieres in the summer of 2012 at a price “substantially below normal rates” as set out by the Quebec Federation of Maple Syrup Producers. Maple Grove later issued a statement that they had “purchased the syrup in good faith and had no reason to believe that it was coming from Quebec or that it may have been stolen. The prices paid were consistent with normal commercial prices for maple syrup purchased from sources outside of Quebec.”

I soon left for South America for a few months to teach at a university. Bruce later informed me by e-mail that when the authorities had come to talk with him, “I gave them a tour, and no Darveau syrup existed in my inventory at that time. Within a couple of weeks my law firm in Montreal received a note from the Quebec police thanking me for our cooperation and saying that, as far as they were concerned, all inquiries had ended.”

Regarding the Darveau syrup, Bruce wrote that he purchased syrup from a Vermont corporation called ESD-LLC, owned by Stephan Darveau, of Sherbrooke, Quebec. Bruce had paid by wire to a Vermont bank, and the syrup was delivered. “I was told many times that the money received by ESD in Vermont was paid to an Ontario company, which in turn purchased the syrup from Ontario and New Brunswick producers and syrup dealers. I was rather far removed from the initial purchase, being the third or fourth hand to the first transaction.”