Alba truffle hunters trial irrigation to beat drought
After a fifth dry summer, Alba's truffle hunters and researchers are testing irrigation and new woodland plots to keep Piedmont's white truffle growing through increasingly erratic rain.
Truffle hunters in Alba are testing irrigation and new woodland plots after a fifth hot, dry summer thinned Piedmont's white truffle harvest, days before the region's Nov. 8 world auction.
The 96th International White Truffle Fair opened on Oct. 10 and runs weekends through Dec. 6, overlapping with the hunting season that started Oct. 1 and closes Jan. 31, 2027. Truffle hunters say July and August brought almost no rain, and a warm October left the soil dry and compact, producing fewer, smaller tubers than usual.
Five years of hotter, drier summers
Watering the woods, not the fungus, is as close to cultivation as the white truffle allows.
Antonio Degiacomi, president of the Centro Nazionale Italiano di Studi sul Tartufo, says the pattern is now five or six years old: hotter summers, increasingly erratic rain. Fair president Axel Iberti says the season opened slowly, with only small specimens after the dry summer, until late-October rain let larger truffles form. Wholesale prices at Alba's market are running 20 to 30% above last season, organizers say.
"You come back with nothing more often than with a truffle," says Tino Marolo, one of the truffle hunters working near Vezza d'Alba with his dog, Stella. Across the Adriatic, Croatian truffle hunter Petar Alebic reports a steeper slide: this year's harvest is roughly 30% below normal, the seventh worsening season running, and he now leads truffle tours to cover the gap.
Armin Mesic, a mycologist at Zagreb's Rudjer Boskovic Institute, says Croatia's white truffle can fetch up to €4,000 a kilogram once drought thins supply, and that the forest zones where it grows are shrinking. He blames the same pattern hitting Piedmont: less rain, higher heat, soils that no longer hold enough moisture for the fungus's root partnerships to form.
Truffle hunters trial new ground
Piedmont researchers reject talk of extinction, calling the drought a challenge rather than an endpoint. Degiacomi says scientists are studying soil microorganisms and trialing irrigation through dry spells, trying, in his words, to "artificially do what nature does." Municipalities, landowners and truffle hunters are also opening new public truffle grounds and planting trees meant to host future harvests.
A sapling needs more than a decade before its roots can support a truffle, and unlike cultivated black truffle, the white variety still resists large-scale farming. The season's next test comes Nov. 8, when the World Auction of the Alba White Truffle links bidders in Hong Kong, Singapore and Vienna from the Castello di Grinzane Cavour, a charity sale running since 1999 that has raised more than €7.2 million to date.
Watering the woods, not the fungus, is as close to cultivation as the white truffle has ever allowed.
