And what about that most troubling of unintended consequences: the black market, the subterranean world of contraband sap where wildcatters move unmarked barrels through Elmore Leonard country, the seedy history behind your stack of morning hotcakes or pancakes, or, as they insisted everywhere I went, crêpes. Especially interesting are the criminals, pirates of syrup nation, who, attracted by the peak prices, skulk through warehouses, waiting for the watchman to doze off over his Hockey News as the getaway truck idles.

Barrels of maple syrup at the Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve, in Laurierville, Quebec. By Leyland Cecco.

Sweet Nothings

Aunt Jemima is a phony, a fake. In fact, there really was no Aunt Jemima. The original character was borrowed from a minstrel show that was touring the South at the end of the 19th century. The original Jemima was a white man in black face, possibly a German. The character was re-purposed in the 1890s by an American mill owner who sold pancake mix with an Aunt Jemima who, though smiling beneath her headscarf, looks nothing like the Aunt Jemima of my childhood. In 1893, marketers hired Nancy Green, who’d been a slave in Kentucky, to play Aunt Jemima, which she did till her death, in 1923. By the 1930s, General Mills, which had bought the company, had begun to churn through Aunt Jemimas, printing up frankly offensive catchphrases such as “Let ol’ Auntie sing in yo’ kitchen.” The Aunt Jemima on the label today is a composite, a dream of antebellum domesticity, the bosomy warmth of Sunday in Dixieland, where Jim calls Huck “honey” as they float down the big river. Why does that trademark still exist? Probably because no group has yet turned its attention to it: #jemimasoracist. Enjoy your view from the Stop & Shop shelf, Aunt Jemima, your days are numbered.

Which is what I was thinking about as I drove across Canada, en route to perhaps the holiest place in syrup. America has its Strategic Petroleum Reserve. In case of embargo, nukes, Mad Max. Canada has a Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve. In case of Butterworth, Jemima, who knows what. Jemima stands for everything Canadians distrust about the planet and the syrup much of it consumes.

It’s one of the things FPAQ was organized to battle. Phony syrup and its lies, fake backstories cooked up for Aunt Jemima and her pal, Mrs. Butterworth. Caroline Cyr, a spokesperson for the federation—perfect name for a syrup lady—seemed especially irritated by varieties of what is essentially high-fructose corn syrup, products that often decorate their labels with maple trees and log cabins, implying a connection to the forest that simply does not exist. FPAQ fights with advertising and fancy recipes—Crustless Vegetable Quiche with Maple Syrup, Crêpes with Kale and Maple Syrup, Maple-Almond Truffles—but mostly by controlling the quality and quantity of the product.

Hence the Reserve.

Barrel In

Here’s how it works: there are 13,500 maple-syrup producers in Quebec. Each is permitted to send a fixed amount to FPAQ for sale that year, a quota that was established in 2004, even as U.S. production has exploded (up 27 percent from 2015). Members of the federation—Quebec’s bulk producers are required to join—give their harvest over to FPAQ, which inspects, tastes, and grades the syrup. Some of it is sold immediately; the rest is stored in the Reserve. Producers are paid only when the syrup is sold, which can mean years. FPAQ keeps $54 for each barrel, a kind of tax that pays for the advertising, the testing of the recipes, the upkeep of the Reserve, and so on. In this way, the federation steadies supply, filling the coffers in banner years, satisfying demand in fallow. In this way, the price of syrup is stabilized, benefiting even the competitors across the border.

The Reserve is in Laurierville, a town in the heart of Quebec. Steeples, snowy roads, hills, old men in berets eating croissants at McDonald’s. It’s reached via spotless highways where no one tailgates or cuts you off or honks in anger. It’s just the polite double beep in Quebec, a state of play that seems connected to how most syrup producers have been content to leave the free market for the safety of a cartel. It’s a better life, with less road rage, but also not as colorful, nor as interesting, and forget about the windfall and resulting spree.

NEARLY 540,000 GALLONS OF SYRUP WAS STOLEN—12.5 PERCENT OF THE RESERVE—WITH A STREET VALUE OF $13.4 MILLION.

Caroline Cyr met me at the back door of the Reserve and took me on a tour. As I said, it’s the holy of holies, where oceans of syrup, the accumulated wealth of Canadian forests, hibernates, sometimes for months, sometimes for years. I had a clear mental picture of the Reserve: huge vats, surface crusted and covered with flies; tanks reached by tottering ziggurats; visitors in perpetual danger of falling in and doing the slowest, stickiest, sweetest dead man’s float of all time. In fact, the Reserve, which might hold 7.5 million gallons on a typical day, is a warehouse filled with barrels, white drums stacked from floor to ceiling, nearly 20 feet high. There was a Charles Sheeler-like quality to the place, an industrial awesomeness, the barrels in endless rows, the implied weight of them, persnickety and precise in a way that seems especially Canadian. It’s almost like the life we know, but not quite. It’s so close, yet so different. A treasure trove, with inventory, at any given time, worth perhaps $185 million. The syrup is tested when it comes in, then sent through a Willie Wonka-esque conveyor system where it’s pasteurized and sealed in a barrel, forklifted and stacked. Each barrel carries a label with a grade (Extra Light, Light, Medium, Amber, Dark) and percentage. When maple water exits a maple tree, it’s 2 to 4 percent sugar. As it’s boiled, the sugar concentrates. To be syrup, it must be 66 percent sugar. Below that, it’s not stable. Above 69 percent, it turns into something else. Butter. Taffy. Candy. There were two or three guys cruising around on forklifts, in hairnets. “We’re all waiting for the spring,” Cyr told me, “when this place will be filled with barrels.” Being in syrup is like being a tax accountant. Three or four weeks of intensity followed by months of waiting and wondering.