Alba white truffle fair runs from 10 October to 6 December

The Alba white truffle fair opens on 10 October and runs to 6 December, a 96th edition that fixes the calendar for the whole white truffle season.

The world market sits in the Cortile della Maddalena in the centre of Alba, open Saturdays and Sundays from 9.30am to 7.30pm, with entry at 6 euros. Every truffle offered for sale passes a quality commission before it reaches a table, which is the part of the fair that matters to buyers: white truffle is sold by smell and by weight, and both are easy to fake.

Nine weekends is a long run for a product that cannot be stored. Tuber magnatum pico does not farm; it is dug wild from oak, hazel and lime roots in the Langhe, Roero and Monferrato hills, and the size of the harvest is set by summer rain months before anyone picks up a knife.

White truffle is the only crop where a bad harvest is good news for the seller.

What the Alba white truffle fair sells

Around the market sit cooking shows, tastings, truffle hunts with licensed diggers and the Palio degli Asini, the donkey race on 4 October that opens the town's medieval programme. The commercial centre of gravity, though, is the World Alba White Truffle Auction on 8 November at the castle of Grinzane Cavour, in its 27th edition and linked by video to bidding rooms abroad.

That auction is a fundraiser rather than a price benchmark. The 2025 edition raised 502,000 euros for charity, and the organisers count close to a hundred social projects supported over five years. Trophy lots go for figures no restaurant would pay, which is precisely why they are not a guide to what a kitchen will spend in November.

A season set by the weather

Piedmont's producers spent the summer watching rainfall, as they do every year. Truffle yields swing hard on it, and the crop that follows a dry August tends to be small, hard and expensive; a wet autumn rots what a dry summer spared. The fair publishes no forecast, and the market price only settles once the first serious lots are on the tables in late October.

Seasonal produce is having an uneven year across Europe. Olive oil is cheap and nervous, while cocoa forecasts keep falling in West Africa. Truffle is the one crop where scarcity is the business model.