Like winery tourists warming up for a tasting, fourth-graders from the Charter School for Applied Technology listened patiently Friday as the “sommelier,” Erie County forester Dan Ciszak, explained the ins and outs of making maple syrup.

They learned how miles of new tubing attached to taps is once again drawing sap from a stand of maples on a Town of Sardinia hilltop down to the county sugar shack on Genesee Road, which has reopened six years after budget problems shut it down.

And they watched as most of the milky liquid boiled off in the stainless steel evaporator, yielding a thickened substance in shades from light to dark gold.

Then they got what they came for, all the way from the Town of Tonawanda.

“Would you guys like to taste a little syrup?” Ciszak teased.

“YES!” the more than two-dozen kids chorused.

As forestry workers filled one-ounce cups with sweetness, a debate began about whether the darker or lighter variety would taste better. The verdict was swift and conclusive.

Darnell Bell, 10, of Buffalo, pronounced the deeper color “the best syrup I ever tasted.” His classmates agreed.

Pure maple syrup is a healthy alternative to other sweeteners because it is a fructose, pointed out Ciszak, who worked at the sugar shack before it was closed and returned as head of the reinstated forestry department in 2008.

“It’s good for your body — the pancreas and spleen — and has lots of vitamins,” he said.

The field trip may have been a lark for the charter school class, but it was also an exercise in test-marketing for the county, which expects to ring up annual sales of $100,000 from the revived Sugar Shack by 2013.

The 400 maples in the 16-acre first lot of the 50-acre sugarbush off Genesee Road are expected to produce about 550 gallons of syrup in the first year. It will be sold with excess sap on the wholesale market, where it is expected to bring in about $20,000.

The goal is to boost annual production to 2,500 gallons, which would make $100,000 for county taxpayers, according to County Executive Chris Collins.

There are no plans to sell the syrup in local retail stores.

Opening the facility and the nearby sawmill, which also had been closed but is now turning fallen trees into lumber for county highway and buildings-and grounds-departments, means “our investments in parks are coming back to where they should be,” Collins told the school tour.

Collins announced the return of the sugar shack and sawmill Thursday in his annual state of the county message as part of a strategy to better manage all 3,000-plus acres of forestland in Concord and Sardinia—property that the county began accumulating in 1928 but has sometimes neglected.