Alba and the White Truffle Fair

An insider's autumn in Piedmont — the Alba truffle market, the cellars in their post-harvest mood, and the rituals that make this October week unrepeatable.

There is a small wooden stall at the back of the Alba truffle market, on the third Saturday of October each year, that is run by a man named Battista whose family has been hunting the white truffle in the woods around Roddi for three generations. His stock on a typical Saturday is perhaps twenty pieces, ranging from the size of a marble to the size of a small egg. He weighs them on a brass scale. He prices them at what the year requires and not a euro less. And the buyers who arrive at his stall — chefs from Milan and Lyon, hoteliers from Turin, the occasional German collector — accept his prices without discussion, because the truffle they take home from Battista is, by general acknowledgement, the best truffle one can buy in the public market on any given Saturday morning.

The Geography of the Hunt

The white truffle of Alba — Tuber magnatum pico, technically — grows in symbiotic relationship with the roots of certain trees, principally oak, hazel, poplar, and lime, in a small geographic area centred on the Langhe and Roero hills of southern Piedmont. It cannot be cultivated. It cannot be reliably forecast. It grows where it grows, and it is found by trained dogs working with their handlers — the trifolao — typically at night or in the very early morning, in the woods that the trifolao have learned over many years to read.

The season runs, formally, from the first of October to the thirty-first of January. The peak in flavour and in supply is from the third week of October through the middle of November. The Alba market — the Mercato Mondiale del Tartufo Bianco — runs each weekend during this window in the historic centre of Alba, with the stalls opening at nine and closing at lunch. It is one of the great agricultural markets of Europe, and one we recommend to almost any client visiting Piedmont in autumn.

The Hunt, Privately

Most visitors to Alba experience the truffle through the market and through the menus of the local restaurants. A more considered alternative, which we arrange for clients with a serious interest, is a private truffle hunt with one of the trifolao in the woods around the town. The hunt takes place either before dawn or in the late afternoon — these are the hours at which the dogs work best — and lasts approximately two hours. The visitor accompanies the trifolao and his dog through the woods, learning to read the small signs in the leaf litter that suggest a possible find, and watching the dog at work.

The dogs themselves are the protagonists. Most are Lagotto Romagnoli, the small curly-haired breed that has been used for truffle hunting in northern Italy for centuries. The relationship between trifolao and dog is, in many cases, the relationship of a working partnership of fifteen years' standing. To watch a Lagotto search a section of the wood and then suddenly stop, freeze, and begin to dig — the trifolao moving in immediately to control the dig and recover the truffle before the dog disturbs it — is to watch one of the more affecting working relationships in European agriculture.

The Tables of the Truffle

Piedmont's autumn dining scene is, by some measure, the most concentrated in Italy. Piazza Duomo in Alba — Enrico Crippa's three-Michelin-starred kitchen — is the public destination, and we book it well in advance for clients prepared for the experience. La Ciau del Tornavento in Treiso, with its two Michelin stars and its remarkable wine cellar, is a serious alternative. The smaller traditional addresses — Trattoria della Posta in Monforte, Osteria della Chiocciola in Alba, the Locanda del Pilone above La Morra — serve the more honest version of the cuisine.

The truffle features, in most of these kitchens during the season, as a generously shaved garnish over agnolotti del plin, fonduta, tajarin with butter, raw fassona beef. The pricing is usually a per-gram supplement to the base dish. Restaurants that pretend to use the truffle but include the cost in the headline price almost without exception use less of it; the supplement model is, in our experience, the more honest one. We suggest our clients budget approximately fifty to seventy euros per person for the truffle supplement at a given meal during the season.

Where to Stay

The Piedmont luxury hotel scene in October is at its annual peak. We send our clients most often to two properties. Castello di Guarene, the restored eighteenth-century castle in the Roero with twenty-six rooms, sits above the vineyards north of Alba and has, in our experience, the best location in the region for a truffle-and-wine week. Villa Beccaris in Monforte d'Alba is smaller and more contemporary in feel, with twenty-two rooms and a private garden, set in the heart of the Barolo zone.

For clients who want something quieter, we have curated a small inventory of restored cascine — converted farmhouses, often associated with one of the wine producers, taken with full domestic staff and a private chef. A cascina in the hills above Barolo, with the truffle market thirty minutes away and a winery within walking distance, is for the right client the most considered Piedmontese week we know how to arrange.

We begin work on these stays in March of the same year; by July the inventory for the high autumn weeks is largely committed.

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