The Trouble with Truffles

Also in Italy...

Jason and I are driving around the Piemonte region of Italy, and I am having a hard time not calling it "wine country." I feel like a jerk using that term; to me it conjures up images not of any actual wine-producing area, but of some tourism board trying to slap an easy-to-understand slogan on something. But here, everywhere I look, castles and estates are perched on high hills covered with grape vines, many of them growing the nebbiolo grapes that only take root in this region. When I look out over these hills, the fall colors are muted enough to make the scene look like more like a painting than something I'm actually seeing. This is my first time in Italy, and it's kind of hard to believe that this is real.

But right now we're not here for wine, we’re trying to find the truffle auction. At the gorgeous, ultra-modern Ceretto winery yesterday, Roberta, of the Ceretto family's fourth generation to work the winery, told us that the charity auction was in one of the area castles. She pointed toward it across the hills, and these are the directions we’re following now: looking for castles in "that direction." In our tiny car, we snake up and down the hairpin roads. I'm amazed that so many of these curves don’t have guardrails.

"I'm about ready to give up searching and go to lunch," says Jason. I agree. My breakfast had consisted primarily of free samples of cheese, pasta, and cookies at the International White Truffle Festival in Alba that morning. In the cold festival building (which is huge and I'm guessing empty for most of the year) grizzled men stood in front of cases of truffles (mostly white, a few black), trying to convince festival-goers to buy their wares. I was surprised when they let me hold one. A truffle, especially a white truffle (which is much more difficult to grow), is such a rare commodity in America. Don't they know what a mistake it could be to put one into my hand? I mean, this is the girl who tripped intro Dolce & Gabbana in Milan, flying through the front door and past the well-suited man holding it open. It seemed to me that there were hundreds of ways — from hand spasms to spontaneous sweats — by which I could ruin their very expensive little fungi.

At the festival, we walked from case to case, holding and sniffing different truffles while Jason translated for me. One man handed us a truffle with a moon-like crater. "He says that the hole makes it smell better," said Jason. I took a whiff, and the scent was rich and deep and foresty, like an American mushroom's foreign cousin had suddenly whirled into town to charm all of the women and become fast friends with the men.

The view from the Ceretto winery.

For us, however, the best-smelling truffle didn't have a crater. It came from a man on the end of the truffle-selling row who had a shoulder-length haircut that reminded me of medieval times. He held his truffle out to us, impatient. We purchased it for 30 euros, this little fungus not much bigger than a bouncy ball you'd get from those quarter machines at the exit of the grocery store.

After the man wrapped our truffle in a bit of paper towel and put it in an official truffle-festival numbered bag, we trotted over to the stage in the middle of the room, where a sign printed in both Italian and English told us that we could have the quality of our truffle checked by the truffle council. Two smiling men took the truffle from Jason's hand and breathed in deep. "Will you use it today?" the man on the left asked. We both shrugged. "Use it today or tomorrow," the man replied. But it garnered their approval. Our truffle was good.

We put the truffle back in its bag and left the festival with the express purpose of finding the auction, to go Be Journalists. But finally, while we're creeping up and down the roads looking for the auction, we pass the restaurant Trattoria del Castello, see that the parking lot is full of cars, and pull in. "There's one thing I can tell you about Italy," Jason says. "It's that unlike in America, when you see lots of cars outside a restaurant, you know it has to be good." And it is. When we enter, we're not presented with menus, but are instead asked what wine we want with our meal and automatically served course after course. There are at least five antipasti, from a spinach flan to thin slices of coniglio, or rabbit meat. When it comes to the pasta course, we opt to have white truffles shaved onto our meal. The owner — a large, happy man — shaves the truffle himself. As we sip our wine and eat our rich-smelling truffled pasta, Jason comes to an important realization: "I bet there was a lunch with the auction."

I look at him. He looks at me. We both know this means two things: that it was probably a ridiculous cost-per-plate event, and that either way, we're missing it.

Whoops.

But we later found out that we might not have missed much. First of all, it turns out that the primary, $300-a-plate event was in Tokyo, which was linked by satellite to the auction hall in Italy. And sure, they auctioned off a giant 1.05 kg truffle, but whereas this year's largest truffle went for a seemingly enormous $30,900, last year's fetched $330,000. The New York Times reported last week that in the current economic climate, businesses are cutting back on holiday parties, and avoiding luxury goods such as caviar and champagne. And truffles are about as luxury as it gets.

At our not-charity-auction lunch, our main course arrives: veal, wild boar, and fried potatoes, followed by three desserts. Afterwards, when we pay the bill, I'm floored by the cost. I tell myself that I'm not from Italy, and that the experience of a meal like that justified the price. As we hand our cash over, I realize that might be why the grizzled Italian truffle hunters were willing to place their hard-to-find treasures in the hands of a shy and clumsy American girl: more than anything, I was a potential customer during an economic slump.

Even in the bounty of wine country, luxury isn't always an easy sell.

Meg Favreau is managing editor of Table Matters.

Photographs by Meg Favreau and Jason Wilson, "Dispatch" photograph from King Molan via Flickr (Creative Commons), "Plate" photograph from FoodCollection/Getty Images.