The whole idea of competing with restaurants in Hong Kong and Bogotá and Los Angeles baffles Alciati. “Truffles are the most perishable item in the world,” he tells me. “Who says you should be able to eat them thousands of miles from where they were born? I would never go to New York to eat a piece of truffle.”
Truffles are one big headache for the Alciati brothers. Rising worldwide demand raises the prices they have to pay the trusted hunters “di fiducia,” who come to the restaurant’s back door only if they have “belli” truffles that will please the brothers. In this context, “belli” means “smelly,” no matter how gnarled and unattractive the truffles are. Only four years ago, Alciati says, the price for the kind of white truffles his customers expect had gone up to $90 or $100 an etto, or one tenth of a kilogram (about 3.5 ounces). “We thought, mamma mia!” he says. “Now the price is never less than 300,000 lire [about $135], and last year we were paying 420,000 [about $200].” That’s not counting the dirt they pay for, from none-too-scrupulous hunters who don’t bother to brush the truffles very carefully. (Particularly unscrupulous hunters rub dirt into the holes, to add to the weight of the truffles and make them look less uneven.) Nor is it counting the natural water loss, which can amount to 5 percent shrinkage in just two or three days—or the truffles that simply go dead after a day and have to be thrown out.
That works out to a $25 surcharge, given Da Guido’s house standard of 10 grams of truffle shavings per portion of silken homemade tajarin (the egg-rich local tagliolini), say, or delicate tiny meat-filled agnolotti, or polenta with a very soft poached egg on top, or carpaccio of veal, or baccalà with boiled potatoes and anchovy sauce. The brothers feel bad asking that much, but they have no intention of cutting down on the shavings. Sorting through truffles one by one every day for the restaurant until they can find decent ones amounts to a public service for their customers. “We invest a ton of money in truffles every year,” Alciati told me with a sigh. “Often we wish they would disappear from the face of the earth.”
Some people are afraid they might—at least white truffles that announce themselves right away, which is to say good ones. Like Tony May, Alciati complains that he can’t smell the truffles when he walks through the door of his own restaurant—a huge change from his childhood. Truth be told, the truffles I ate in Da Guido’s downstairs kitchen, shaved over the crumbly local mountain cheese Castelmagno (another legendary local product Alciati gets the best of and thinks shouldn’t travel), were very pretty, with their healthy suede color and pink veining. But these—the best truffles Italy has to offer, according to Alba partisans—weren’t much more strongly flavored than the ones I’d had in New York at San Domenico the week before.
Finding truffles has always required as much patience as skill. Most hunters are over 40, in many instances already retired from other careers (the Italian pension system allows very early official retirement) and able to take the time to train dogs. Their foraging walks are guided mostly by the dogs, who literally follow their noses. The dogs must be encouraged to dig but not molest the truffle and are quickly fed a treat before they devour it.
Lately, the dogs have been as discouraged as their masters. Hunters in Piedmont are profiting nicely from the rise in worldwide demand, but not as nicely as they would like. Dario Rinaldi, a hunter in his early seventies who spent his life working in the local Ceretto winery, took me out looking on a favored hillside at one of the Ceretto properties. His movements were slow and spare; he made eloquent use of his cane to guide and follow the dog and to start digging where the dog paused. Sometimes, Rinaldi told me as he brushed the dirt off a “false truffle” his dog had found, he has to bury a real truffle in his backyard to keep the dog in training after too many days without finding one.
Part of the reason for the decline is dry weather—a blessing for vintners but not for hunters, who hope for the damp, cool weather truffles need in order to form. “Buon vino tartufo cattivo,” goes the saying: “Good wine, bad truffles.” There have been fine harvests in Piedmont for the past three years.
More menacing environmental explanations are also put forward. Acid rain comes first, and then fertilizers and weed-killers—hunters say they find no truffles near treated ground. Blaming pollution is intuitive, especially for Greens. But backing up these accusations is very hard, according to Paola Bonfante, a researcher in mycology at the University of Turin. Any data on annual fluctuation is guesswork: Hunters often sell white truffles on the black market to avoid taxes, which makes it impossible to correlate increases in acid rain or the use of herbicides and pesticides to declines in white truffle harvests.
The impact of other man-made environmental changes is indisputable. Truffles grow only under cleared ground, and many property owners—more and more of them absentee, as Piedmont acquires Tuscany-like status for weekend retreats—have no incentive to keep their woods well raked. The Piedmontese government has just stepped in, offering landowners a subsidy to keep their land clean during truffle season as a way of increasing truffle territory. And the widespread planting of fast-growing poplar trees, as a cash crop for making paper, in recent decades has meant widespread loss of truffle habitat. (Certain poplars encourage truffle growth; industrially raised ones do not.) The best truffle trees are oaks and willows, which produce compact, sound truffle flesh and the most perfumed specimens.
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