Fresh From Vermont’s Maples, a Taste of Terroir

Being a foodie and a of VT maple syrup lover ... I could not resist posting this here...

From Today's New York Times -

The five tasters picked up the green vial marked No. 973, swirled, sniffed and sipped. Then there was silence.

Some immediately picked up their pens and began scribbling notes on their sensory scorecards — a three out of seven for vanilla, two out of seven for nutmeg, zero for black licorice, smoke, kiwi and banana.

The rest quietly pondered the flavor as they rolled the liquid across their tongues.

“Sometimes I wonder if we should taste this on pancakes,” Jeff Munroe, who helped organize this tasting of maple syrup in Middlebury, Vt., said with a laugh. “That’s how everyone else does it.”

A maple syrup tasting might seem pointless. Maple syrup’s most prominent flavor is sweet, isn’t it?

But a merry band of professors from Vermont colleges — a geologist, a sensory scientist, a cultural anthropologist and a conservationist — think there’s much more to it. In an informal study, they hope to show that syrups vary by region, with nuances that could help small-scale producers use their locations like a brand.

“Small syrup makers are still competing with Aunt Jemima,” said Amy Trubek, an anthropologist and assistant professor of nutrition and food science at the University of Vermont who is coordinating the project. “Like Burgundy wines or Savoie cheeses, the terroir of maple syrups matters.”

Does that French concept of goût de terroir — the taste of place — apply to maple syrup? That’s the point of the tastings. The researchers hope to determine whether a syrup made from trees sitting on limestone bedrock has, say, more spice and fruit notes than one made from trees growing on a foundation of schist. And do the size of the farm, the soil, the production methods and other factors also affect flavor, and if so, how?

“What we want to do,” Ms. Trubek said, “is apply the techniques used by the wine world to argue that not all Vermont maple syrups are the same.”

That concept is foreign, even anathema, to most sugar makers, as syrup producers are called in Vermont. There, the Vermont brand is king. The only official distinctions between syrups are color and viscosity. So-called fancy syrups are the clearest and thinnest, followed by Grade A medium amber, Grade A dark amber and Grade B, which has the strongest flavor. But within each grade there is a wide range of flavors, from milky caramel to toasted hazelnut and molasses.

In October, the group held a public tasting in Shelburne.

“I was astonished at the differences,” said one person who attended, Kim Borsavage, who owns a bed-and-breakfast near Shelburne. Ms. Borsavage said she preferred the syrup from limestone bedrock; a good thing, she said, because she gets her syrup nearby and the area is mainly underlined with limestone.

She said she was put off, though, by the “moldy” and “dirty” taste of a syrup that came from trees grown on schist bedrock.

Such distinctions had intrigued Ms. Trubek, whose book “The Taste of Place” is to be published next fall by the University of California Press. In a state like Vermont that prizes its rural heritage and individualism, she said, why is every syrup supposedly the same?

John Elder, a professor of English and environmental studies at Middlebury, had similar thoughts, but for different reasons.

Mr. Elder, who in early September made local headlines when he dressed up as a maple tree, complete with a three-foot leafy headdress, for a five-day walk to call attention to global warming, said he imagined a time when Vermont might offer syrup tours the same way Napa offers wine tours. “People begin to value the place through the product,” he said.

And Mr. Munroe, a geology professor at Middlebury College, was keen to find out whether words like “mineral” and “flinty,” which so often appear on wine and other food labels, had a scientific underpinning. “These are 100-year-old trees that are deeply rooted,” he said. “There was a good possibility there was a connection.”

The professors have shared not only their interest, but also their resources. (The project has no financing yet.)

Mr. Munroe had Lee Corbett, an undergraduate geology major, collect samples from 18 family-owned sugar makers last spring and test them with an inductively coupled plasma argon emission spectrometer at Middlebury. The machine, which usually analyzes rocks, vaporized the syrup, then pushed it through a 15,000-degree plasma flame — hotter than the surface of the sun. The vapor then disintegrates into its individual elements, which the machine reads and records.

“It was a funny convergence,” Mr. Munroe said. “All these people in white lab coats watching this giant machine worth hundreds of thousands of dollars go to work on a jug of maple syrup. But then, there have been worse things in there. Last year, someone analyzed snail’s blood.”

The tests concluded that syrup produced from trees on limestone bedrock had the highest quantities of copper, magnesium, calcium and silica, which scientists hypothesized had a role in the taste. Shale syrups came in second in all of these substances, followed by schist.

A maple terroir was emerging.

They proceeded with the tastings, which were done with the seriousness of scientific pursuit, if not the absolute rigor of controlled scientific experiments.

There were, after all, some difficulties. Unlike wine tasters, the professors didn’t spit.

“That means we can only taste so much,” Ms. Trubek said, “before we start bouncing off the walls.”

By JANE BLACK