The days are getting longer, so we can extend our range. Yesterday we made it to the far corner of New England, to North Hero, VT in Lake Champlain.

North Hero is one town south of the Canadian border and a kayak ride from New York. The islands are beautiful flat farmland, with stunning vistas of the lake and the mountains beyond on both sides. If you time your dinner reservation right, you can drive homeward during the long sunset over the Adirondacks. Now that's a dessert!

We had also spent a few hours in Burlington, first at the Fleming Art Museum at University of Vermont, and then shopping in town, so we had less time than usual for exploring the backroads and byways. We did make it out to Malletts Bay but then we had to make tracks for North Hero.

Along the way we could not resist one stop: almost to the first island on Route 2,we saw a homemade sign for wine and maple products, next left. We ended up following a gravel road into the woods, emerging by a humble farm shed with an "open" flag. This is Hillis' Sugarbush Farm and Vineyard.

We were greeted by Luna, a friendly standard black poodle who looked somewhat out of place in this rustic setting. Inside, Judy Hillis greeted us and we got to examine her wares. Two in particular interested us: Maple Ambrosia is a pure maple wine, possibly unique in the USA for now, for reasons explained below. Candy Apple is an apple-maple wine. Both are sweet, but not desperately so, with the Maple Ambrosia the drier of the two.

We both enjoyed both maple wines, but I preferred the Maple Ambrosia. It is lightly sweet, with good maple flavor but not too much residual sugar. This is important because it has little natural acidity I don't know where any tannins might come from. I must talk to winemaker Jim Hillis the next time we are up there. It does exhibit a phenomenon I have seen with meads fermented to utter dryness: the taste of something sweet remains after the sugar is gone, so the memory of the flavor of the sweet thing brings a sense of sweetness that exceeds the actual sugar content.

Making maple wine is not a secret; there are plenty of heombrewers' recipes for maple wine. And a web search turns up a few commercially-available maple wines in Canada. Judy explained that the trick was not making the wine, but getting approvial to sell it. Wine is made from fruit, as mead is from honey and ale is from grain, but maple is not a fruit, so it is not on the list of products from which you can make wine to sell to the public, banned along with poison ivy and other noxious non-fruits. Judy's husband Jim did the work to get the approval, and now his pioneering efforts may introduce a new delicacy to Vermont's foodie palette!

NOTE: There is another, more famous Sugarbush Farm in maple country. The Sugarbush Farm in Woodstock, VT is a much bigger commercial operation. They make the little three-block cheddar-cheese packs that you see in the shops that cater to tourists. The two Sugarbushes are unrelated.