The dog is described as a labrador, although it’s fair to say he wouldn’t win
any prizes at Cruft’s. Rough-coated and barrel-chested, with incongruously
large ears, he has more than a touch of terrier. What’s not in dispute is
the eagerness with which he tracks around the roots of an oak tree, urged on
by his owner, Aldo, in a soft Piedmontese dialect. Mind you, he’s probably
worth more than a Cruft’s champion: Mickey — as he’s called, after the mouse
with large ears — is a champion hunter of white truffles.
Aldo tells me how a famous Swiss hotel once invited him to hunt for white
truffles in its grounds: they laid on one sumptuous bedroom for him and
another for the dog. They were wasting their time, of course, and not only
because Mickey stayed with his master. Although black truffles are
relatively common, there are still only two places where the white variety
is found: Istria in Croatia, and Piedmont in Italy — in particular, the part
of Piedmont known as Le Langhe, south of Alba.
I ask Aldo what he thinks of black truffles. “They’re fine for pâté,” he
shrugs. “I give them to my friends.”
To illustrate the difference, he pulls out a Tupperware box, his haul from the
past two nights. It contains a dozen yellow lumps, varying in size from
pieces of grit to a couple that resemble fossilised vertebrae. I stick my
nose in. The sensation is extraordinary. Receptors I didn’t know I had seem
to burst into life. My head is filled with a musky, fragrant, voluptuous
aroma, as dizzying as helium and as sensual as a kiss. There is none of the
sweaty pungency of black truffles, or the farmyard bouquet of preserved
truffle oil. In that moment, I am addicted.
This is seriously bad news. For one thing, this is not a cheap habit: truffles
currently cost €150 (£100) for 100 grams, and will go up as the season goes
on — November is the best month. For another, white truffles lose freshness
rapidly, and can only be eaten locally. Each trifolau has a couple
of chefs they supply every day, a relationship as intense as that between
drug dealer and customer.
It is claimed you can taste the difference between truffles found under
different species of tree. I am sceptical of what sounds like a foodie myth
— after all, how does the consumer know what tree it comes from? — but Aldo
nods. They even look different, he tells me: oak truffles are heavier and
darker, while those from the sweet chestnut are lighter. The palest and most
fragrant of all are found under lime trees, but those are especially rare.
Under the oak, Mickey has drawn a blank. Aldo shrugs. “Maybe this is a
November tree,” he says. “I’ll come back in a month. Or maybe next year.
That’s the thing about truffles. There’s always another time.”
The encounter has been arranged by our hotel, the Villa Beccaris in Monforte
d’Alba. Truffle hunting is increasingly popular with guests, who buy
truffles from the trifolau direct and take them along to a local
osteria. Surprisingly for such an elegant retreat, the hotel has no
restaurant itself — but, as Federica, the manager, explains, when there are
half a dozen of the best restaurants in Italy within a few minutes’ drive,
why compete? What it does have, though, is views. When the waiter brings
your glass of wine, he’s able to identify the vineyard by pointing.
That evening, at the nearby Trattoria della Posta, I eat fonduta: egg
yolks, cream and fontina cheese, smothered under a mound of Aldo’s leaf-thin
truffle shavings. This is the kind of simple, rich food the Piedmontese
themselves eat with truffles. It’s fantastic. Luckily, the mark-up is fairly
reasonable: my fonduta ends up costing about £20. In fact, the
whole meal is superb value. The walnut bread, for example, tastes lightly
smoked, yet is somehow completely fresh. It turns out that, having got up at
dawn to bake it, the chef then smokes the loaf in the wood-burning pizza
oven all day. Yet for this extraordinary attention to detail there is no
charge — the bread is free.
To accompany the truffle we drink the local Barolo, “wine of kings and king of
wines”, made from the temperamental nebbiolo grape. This powerful, inky red
generates almost as much mystique among wine lovers as the truffle does
among gastronomes. It comes from an area smaller than a single commune of
Margaux, yet there are hundreds of producers, many commanding astronomic
prices. The good news is that while Barolo used to require 10 or 20 years to
reach its peak, faster maceration and smaller barrels mean the spectacular
run of good vintages from 1997 to 2001 are already drinking well.
There are wine lovers who say you shouldn’t overwhelm Barolo with truffles,
and foodies who say you shouldn’t overwhelm truffles with a strong wine, but
the Piedmontese simply say “bun pi bun fa bun” — good with
good is good. Again, the mark-up is often very reasonable. In one restaurant
we ordered a half-bottle of award-winning 2001 Paesi Tuoi for £10; in the enoteca
down the road, the retail price was £7.
Many restaurants are situated among vineyards, overlooking neatly planted
vines. During our visit in September, each stem still had a dangling udder
of precious black grapes, but come late October and November, the leaves
will turn, first a brilliant crimson, and then gold — a sight as spectacular
as a New England fall.
Locanda del Pilone, near Alba, has one such vineyard view. It’s
Michelin-starred — as are eight other restaurants in the surrounding hills —
but still relatively unpretentious. A salad of quail, quail eggs, fresh
leaves and pomegranate seeds, heaped with truffle, was one of the trip’s
most memorable dishes. More stratospheric in every sense is the hilltop La
Ciau del Tornavento, which has two stars and is correspondingly grander. The
atmosphere here, like the food, occasionally borders on the self-important —
risotto came with an escalope of foie gras dusted in chocolate, which might
just be taking the “good goes with good” philosophy a step too far.
Such eclectic cuisine is atypical for this area. Rather, each town or region
will dedicate itself to excellence in one particular ingredient. Thus Alba
is indisputably the capital of the truffle, with a festival in October, a
weekly market every Saturday, and a street, Via Vittorio Emanuele, crammed
with shops selling truffles and related products. Barolo has an enormous
wine shop, as well as a strangely fascinating museum of corkscrews in its
castle, while nearby Cherasco is an official “city of the snail”. My
antipasto at the tiny Osteria Caffe Umberto consisted of snail salami served
with lardon: pure white fat, sliced as thin as prosciutto. It melted in the
mouth, though possibly not in the arteries. To follow, there were snails
with tajarin, the local egg pasta. The cost was £11 for three
courses, with wine.
Another place where they like snails is Bra, the centre of the Slow Food
movement. This wonderful organisation promotes the virtues of good food,
local produce and a relaxed way of life — one of its first successes was
getting organic food served in the town’s schools, although it’s a fair bet
the children weren’t eating Turkey Twizzlers before. Fittingly, Slow Food
started in a restaurant, the Osteria Boccondivino, over a long lunch. It’s
still the movement’s unofficial HQ, serving traditional Piedmontese dishes.
There isn’t much to do in this region except eat, drink and get lost on the
surprisingly inaccessible roads as you travel between one ancient hilltop
town looming abruptly out of the mist to another. Piedmont means “foothill”,
and the derivation of the name is clear enough: on three sides you’re hemmed
in by distant Alps, while to the south the Ligurian coast is just an hour
away. For centuries the region was more French than Italian, part of the
kingdom of Savoy. It shows in their cooking, which is based on butter and
cream rather than olives or tomatoes. Game, particularly of the flying
variety, is sought after, and there’s a dazzling array of cheeses, including
the spectacularly stinky castelmagno — we were served one example that was
five years old. But that’s typical of the area: when nobody’s in a hurry, to
eat a cheese that’s only a couple of years old is tantamount to infanticide.
It’s said that Napoleon was so taken with grissini, the local
breadsticks — each one handmade, and often as wonky as a pig’s tail — that
he started a fast postal service from Turin to Paris just so he could rush
them to his table. One can’t help thinking that if the emperor had tasted
white truffles, he might have slowed down and simply stayed in Piedmont
instead.
Travel details: Anthony Capella travelled as a guest of
Italian Expressions (020 7433 2675, www.expressionsholidays.co.uk), which
has three-night breaks at the Hotel Villa Beccaris in Monforte d’Alba from
£510pp, including B&B accommodation, British Airways flights from
Gatwick to Turin and car hire. Or try Key2holidays (020 7749 3623,
www.key2italy-holidays.co.uk), which offers seven hotels around the Piedmont
region.
Anthony Capella’s latest novel, The Wedding Officer, is published by
Little, Brown at £12.99
Where to eat and stay in truffle country
Trattoria della Posta, Locanda Santa Anna 87, Monforte
d’Alba, 00 39-0173 78120; closed Thu and Fri lunchtime; about £30 a head
plus wine
Locanda del Pilone, Frazione Madonna di Como 34, Alba, 0173
366616; closed Tue and Wed lunchtime; about £40 a head plus wine
La Ciau del Tornavento, Piazza Baracco 7, Treiso, 0173
638333; closed Wed and Thu lunchtime; about £50 a head plus wine
Osteria Caffe Umberto, Via Vittorio Emanuele 82, Cherasco,
0172 489065; closed Tue; about £10 a head plus wine
Hotel Villa Beccaris, Via Bava Beccaris 1, Monforte d’Alba,
0173 78158, www.villabeccaris.it; doubles from £120, B&B
