Surcrerie de la Montagne had one of its biggest days yesterday, Easter Sunday.
“I had a dream of keeping these traditions alive.”
Pierre Faucher and his team welcomed over 2000 guests to feast on eggs and ham and sausage and tortiere, the traditional meat pie of Quebec, all covered in as much maple syrup as you’d like.
ListenThe sap is running in the maple forests of eastern Canada and the north-eastern United States, and while there are thousands of Shugar Shacks, as they’re known in English, the Sucrerie de la Montagne is one special place.
Designated a “heritage site” it is nestled into 120 acres of maple forest atop Mount Rigaud, less than an hour’s drive from Montreal. And it is open year-round.
It all began for Pierre Faucher, forty years ago, with his love for the location, and the vocation.
“I worked with the farmer who had this maple forest, I was running the trees and making maple syrup in a little shack with no running water in the middle of this woods and I thought, ‘Wow this is a beautiful place!'”
Pierre Faucher, president of Sucrerie de la Montagne, is seen checking one of the pales at his sugar shack on March 24, 2015 in Rigaud, Que. (CP/Paul Chiasson)
The farmer was getting on in age, and none of his eight children were interested in the maple trees, so he sold it to Faucher, “at a good price” he says.
“Together he helped me take apart the 10 old barns, build the dining rooms and we built the shugar shack and the bakery too.” He was “a good carpenter”, Faucher says fondly.
“I had a dream of keeping these traditions alive.”
Faucher says as a child he always enjoyed going to the sugar shack, going into the woods, seeing all the buckets on the trees and tasting the syrup.
He thought it was beautiful then and he vowed to keep it that way, despite the fact that he could produce three times as much syrup if he were to adapt modern pipeline production instead of the buckets.
“It’s romantic” he says.
And when the spring is over the summer and fall makes the venue a beautiful location for a wedding, perhaps.
Faucher is a maple syrup ambassador. “I’ve been going around the world since 1984”, he says.
He is part of the tourism industry branding the maple syrup experience with Canada and Quebec.
Tourists arrive all through the summer. Faucher says they have about 50,000 visitors through the year.
Faucher loves being on site to meet and greet the guests, and he’s particularly proud of the multi-cultural and age-range of visitors.
“You know wood tables, wood benches, oil lamps and woven curtains, fireplaces, wood stoves, all that stuff is universal.” he says.
As for the next forty years, Faucher says his son Stefan works alongside him now, and appreciates the vision and the labour of love.
And there are two little grand daughters, who at 6 and 7, are only too happy to visit after school.
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