The maple moon. The peoples of the eastern woodlands, the Abenaki, the Haudenosaunee, the Mi'kmaq, cut V's into maple bark, caught the sap in birch-bark bowls, boiled it down. The Anishinaabe called the season the maple moon, the sugar month; the Kanien'kehá:ka call the tree Wahta, the leader of the trees. The French learned to tap from them.
Canada makes more than three quarters of the world's maple syrup, most of it in Quebec, which keeps a strategic reserve. In July 2012 the reserve's barrels at Saint-Louis-de-Blandford were found empty; about six million pounds of syrup had been stolen.
Icewine is a German accident of 1830, frozen grapes at Dromersheim, near Bingen, pressed into a must too sweet to waste. At Inniskillin, in Niagara-on-the-Lake, the birds ate the 1983 crop; nets saved 1984, and its 1989 Vidal won the Grand Prix d'Honneur at Vinexpo in 1991. The grapes must freeze on the vine at minus eight or colder, so the pickers work at night.
Bella Coola is the Nuxalk valley on the BC coast. Alexander Mackenzie reached salt water beyond it on 22 July 1793 and wrote on a rock in vermilion and bear grease, from Canada, by land. The Nuxalk were there first; smallpox in 1862 left a few hundred survivors, in 1894 Norwegian settlers took grants of the emptied land, and the Nuxalk never ceded it.
On the shelf, Smoked Maple Oolong, Organic is the sugar shack's evaporator in a cup; Icewine is the celebration pour; Maple, Eh! Organic carries cranberries on black tea; Maple Peach is the breakfast cup on Ceylon; and Bella Coola, apple, rosehip and hibiscus, is the pitcher for the coast road.
