Maple syrup inc.: Vermont’s maple syrup tradition goes high tech, high finance

On the rugged western slopes of Vermont’s Mt. Mansfield, a web of plastic tubing connects some 71,000 tree taps to one of the frontiers of Vermont’s rapidly changing maple syrup industry.

For weeks now, sap has been flowing through these tubes into 10 tanks, each holding 7,000 gallons, at the Runamok Maple sugarhouse, a block of a building that looks more like a small factory than the shedlike shacks of New England lore. Multimillion-dollar equipment – reverse osmosis machines, a steam-powered evaporator, ­iPhone-connected monitoring systems – hums along next to inventory ready to be shipped around the world. Workers package up sleek bottles holding cardamom-infused and pecan wood-smoked maple syrup – two of about a dozen flavors that Runamok’s owners Eric and Laura Sorkin have developed in the two years since they ditched bulk syrup production and started this artisanal, direct-to-consumer business.

The Sorkins have been upending conventions here since they started sugaring a decade ago, a few years after they quit jobs in Washington, D.C., to farm in Vermont. Back then they jolted locals with the size of their operation, deciding to jump into sugaring with 28,000 taps, an outrageously large number at the time.

“The most charitable way to put it is that we were a curiosity,” Mr. Sorkin says with a laugh. “There were a lot of people who were not expecting it to work out.”

But since then, rather than playing the role of “flatlanders who had more money than sense,” as Eric puts it, he and his wife have emerged as key players in what has become the big business of maple syrup. Armed with a sleek internet presence, contemporary packaging, and a product tasty enough to land on Oprah Winfrey’s “favorite things” list, the Sorkins have helped dramatically change what was until about 20 years ago an agricultural practice fundamentally unchanged since the 1800s.