Early Morning Maple?

I briefly looked into how you actually made maple syrup. It seemed like a long and complicated process. And possibly quite painful if you were the tree having it's sap extracted via a drill. That, and I never quite recovered from the awfully withered, soured fruit borne from the plum tree we had. I think it's just too cold to grow sweet stuff here. So - Potatoes and rhubarb it is. I'll just stick to appreciating our garden maple from a purely aesthetic angle. Is it even a maple tree??? I'm not sure! The leaves never go that lovely red you get in films.