Truffling for fun and (someday) profit

“The truffles, they are like princesses,” Marie assured us, “They need beautiful space to grow but cannot be distressed or disturbed in any way. They are delicate and stubborn and very mysterious.”

I’d never really thought of truffles* as anything but (a) tasty, (b) expensive, (c) often disappointingly bland, and (d) bloody DAMN expensive, but after visiting a truffle orchard, I will forever think of them as…princesses, elusive and persnickety.

Chuck and I are off on another adventure, this time investigating the wines of Bordeaux. Chuck’s the real oenophile in the crew; sampling the appellations of France has been one of his cherished dreams. Me, I’m usually non compos mentis after the second glass, and the whole “notes of apricot and new-mown hay with a lusty finish” stuff is lost on me. Chuck, relaxing with a glass and a hat, in Bordeaux

But I grew up in Central California, and learned to love the art and science of MAKING the wine, even if I rarely drank it.

Now, I AM a mushroom fanatic–I could eat mushrooms all day, all night, dream of them, find them in the woods and cook with them. And it turns out that the best land for growing wine grapes is also excellent for growing truffles. So when we were offered the opportunity to spend the morning in a winery’s truffle orchard (and, incidentally, taste their excellent red), we jumped at the chance.

We docked in Libourne, which sits on the confluence of the Dordogne, the Garone and the estuary in between. We got up early this morning and boarded a bus headed out to the countryside, past the protesting students (it wouldn’t be France without protesting students). Marie, who manages the truffle orchard for Vignobles Dorneau just outside of Libourne, met us there for a truffly lecture.

The wine industry has its ups and downs, and right now the downs are in ascendance: Global warming with its increasingly hot, dry summers has wreaked havoc on wine grape harvests, and there are far too many wineries competing for a shrinking market.

Vintners are running out of customers for the grapes they can harvest and wine seems to have lost its cachet with younger audiences. In Napa and the great pinot vineyards of the Pacific Northwest, vineyards are being plowed under, and thousands and thousands of gallons of grape juice and wine are being dumped, or sold at firesale prices.

That’s great news if you’re looking for bargains by the case (and, in fact, our new wine cellar is rapidly filling up), but not so great if you happen to own the winery. In Bordeaux, vintners are increasingly turning to truffle farming to steady revenues.

Now, I didn’t know you COULD farm a truffle–I had a very romantic notion of merry Frenchmen heading out to the woods with their pigs, digging up pounds and pounds of delightful black rocks and making a small fortune from them.

Uhm, no.

Finding wild truffles in the woods can be a chancy business, says Marie, and in any case pigs aren’t the best choice for truffle seeking. Apparently only lady pigs find truffles, because a truffle smells exactly like the sexiest boar in the world, looking for love, and things can quickly get out of hand when Miss Piggy finds her mantruffle.

“The pigs they are big, and passionate and strong–too strong for us, and if you don’t let them eat the truffles they will bite very hard,” Marie assured me, “So instead we use dogs.” Apparently you can also follow a specific variety of fly that likes to lay its eggs in truffles–if you see a fly on the ground, shoo it away and it comes back, there’s likely a truffle there. “But this takes too much patience and time, only the truffle mafia–the people who steal from truffle farms–do this,” she explained.

A truffle farm resembles an overgrown orchard, with a mix of trees–mostly oak, in this case, but also hazelnut and “hornbeam,” a kind of birch tree. The trees are kept small, with irrigation pipes clambering through the branches. They are specially raised with truffle spores so that they will grow up together, a unique symbiotic relationship. All trees, apparently, partner with some kind of fungal mycelia to exchange nutrients–sugar from the tree via photosynthesis, and calcium plus other nutrients from the mycelia. The nursery raises truffle and tree together to ensure that some other fungus doesn’t horn in.

Truffle mycelia produce a type of herbicide that literally clears the area of weeds in a rough outline of the root structure, something the French call the “brulee,” or burnt area. (Think creme brulee). The truffle farmer carefully trims the tree to match the outline of the brulee, and removes most of the vertical branches so that the truffle mycelia won’t dive down too deep. More than eight inches down and good truffles won’t form.

The farmer innoculates the soil at the beginning of the season with a mix of water, good soil, nutrients, and ground-up truffles frozen from the previous year. At that point one must NEVER step on the brulee–“you will smother the babies,” warns Marie.

There are 300 truffle/tree partnerships in this particular orchard, mostly the prized “black diamonds” that will be harvested between December and February. A very few are “white truffles” that are harvested in the summer, with less flavor, a little more bitterness, and about a third the value of the blacks. “They are not producing yet,” Marie shrugs, “but perhaps in the next year.”

“Perhaps” seems to be a common word in truffle farming; there is no way to know if a specific tree will actually produce truffles THIS year. A prolific tree last year might have zero truffles the next. A lot can happen–there can be too much heat, too much water, too little water. Wild boars can break into the orchard and destroy an entire crop (“a few years ago this happened and we had no truffles at all,” says Marie), rabbits can burrow into the brulee and destroy it, or various bugs and diseases can attack. Or humans can sneak in with their own dogs and steal the crop.

In the winter, they bring out the dog, in this case, “Thor,” possibly the world’s cutest black cocker spaniel. A bigger dog might trample the truffle soil and smother the growing truffles. We got to sit in on one of Thor’s practice sessions; he successfully found all three truffles and got a small treat as a reward.

(At some point I’ll post a really cute video of Thor finding truffles, but it may need to wait until I’m back on my own computer)

A successful orchard of 300 yields an average of maybe 45 pounds of truffles in a good year. Truffles are lightweight, so 45 pounds is more than you might think. Market price for black truffles right now is about $800/pound, which can vary seasonally.

We have truffles in Oregon, the somewhat less delicious white truffles. We actually found one in my old backyard, sliced it and fried it up…it was a bit tasteless. “That’s because,” Marie explained, “you cannot heat a truffle to more than 110F, you destroy the flavor.”

Good to know. The best way to use truffles, apparently, is to grate and macerate them into a fatty substance such as cream or butter. We tried truffle butter on a baguette, with a little red wine. Incredible.

I ended up buying truffle oil and truffle vinegar, the REAL kind. Most of the truffle you find on omelet and pizza isn’t really truffles, Marie says, but rather esthers and polymers that mimic the taste. “The Chinese grow a variety of truffle for pig feed that has no flavor. You can buy that, add flavoring, and that is what is generally sold in stores in the US.”

Hmmmm.

This is just the first stop in our wine tour, and it was fascinating. We’ll get back to wine tomorrow. Right now, I’m tasting truffles.

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* The musky fungal truffle, NOT the luscious and far more affordable chocolate kind…although we are chomping down on those, too. Spain and France are pretty much lousy with great chocolate, a good thing since most of our relatives are chocoholics. Fear not, friends, we’re bringing back a suitcaseful.