It's a drizzly Saturday afternoon in mid-January, and I'm standing in a crowd of several dozen people at Robert Sinskey Vineyards in Napa, watching some Lagotto Romagnolo dogs beg for treats. Eager and Labradoodle-like, these hounds have been professionally trained to hunt for truffles, and their trainers are almost as eager to display the dogs' perspicacity for rooting out the delicacies. We're drinking Chardonnay in the rain and hoping one of the dogs flips out over an unassuming patch of mud.
Earlier that day, I sat through three presentations in Napa's Westin Verasa Hotel on various aspects of the tuber melanosporum, also known as the black Périgord truffle, and the two other species prized for their culinary value. It sounds like something from The Breakfast Club — a series of lectures on fungi at 8 a.m. on a Saturday? Why not a tax audit and a root canal, too? — but I was enthralled. So was nearly everyone else in the room, many of whom had paid good money to attend the Napa Truffle Festival, and not just because we were going to eat a fancy lunch. Contrary to the (now anachronistic) image of old French truffières herding pigs through the forest, trufficulture is a scientifically rigorous enterprise, the pigs long gone. It is also, I learned, big business — and there's a burgeoning competition in Napa to be the first person in California to farm truffles successfully.
Robert Chang, chief truffle officer for the American Truffle Company, explained how a truffle is the fruiting body of a fungus that has a symbiotic relationship with the root systems of oak and hazel trees. The fungus envelopes them, as a glove covers the fingers, and provides access to nutrients the trees can't reach on their own. In return, the tree supplies the fungus with sugar. (In something out of Avatar, trees can also send sugars via the fungus to other baby trees, maintaining equilibrium in the forest.) And unlike above-ground mushrooms, truffle spores spread when mammals eat them, hence their attractive odor.
It's the odor that makes them so intoxicating, according to Ken Frank, the chef at La Toque, the Westin Verasa's Michelin-starred restaurant. Frank stores his truffles with eggs — their yolks absorb the aroma, which would otherwise go to waste — and never with Arborio rice. He avoids cooking them at high temperatures or with acidic foods like tomato sauce, and his measured diatribe against the "abomination" that is truffle oil was Alan Rickman-like in its understated contempt. "It's a mystery to me that the FDA allows it," he said. (By the time he finished elaborating on how to make truffle butter, I was mentally justifying the expense of a buying a few ounces' worth on my way home.)
But there was one more speaker, biologist Paul Thomas. He explained that Australian growers have succeeded at commercial truffle cultivation, expanding their availability outside the usual season. If you do everything properly, you can expect to harvest truffles five years after planting the trees and establishing the right micro-rhizome in the roots. Orchards in Tennessee and Oregon have produced truffles, but Thomas hopes Northern California will replicate Australia's feat, on a much bigger scale.
It was then that I realized what the Napa Truffle Festival really is: a way of convincing people with ample resources to rip out some of their reliably profitable grapevines and invest time, labor, and money on an unproven crop instead. (The five-course truffle lunch with wine pairings that Lazy Bear's Chef David Barzelay prepared for us at Merryvale Winery was a lovely selling point, but ultimately little more than a sideshow.) Truffles, which can sell for hundreds of dollars an ounce, have the potential to be a bigger moneymaker than Cabernet — and that doesn't include the chest-pounding quotient for whoever's the first to do it. As cottage industries like truffle dog training companies have already sprung up around the expected windfall, success seems inevitable. Someone only has to do it.
At the vineyard, as the dogs demonstrate their acuity at discovering truffles their trainers have planted, I speak with Debby Zygielbaum, Robert Sinskey's dirt farmer and sheep wrangler (or so her business card says). It was she who cleared an acre-and-a-half of biodynamically farmed wine grapes to plant English white oak and filbert trees. Isn't it a strange coincidence, I ask, that two specialized and highly lucrative crops will grow in the same soil?
"We looked at a few different vineyards, and this was the sweet spot. We have a lot of degree days," she says, referring to the measurement of temperature variations that's crucial for high agricultural yields. The delicate micro-rhizome that truffles require in order to fruit is less likely to be outcompeted here. Mathematically, Zygiellbaum expects to harvest 45 to 75 pounds of truffles, reaping tens of thousands of dollars, and her attitude is essentially "Any minute now."
I put the same question to Paul Thomas, who agrees it's essentially a numbers game: "Hopefully, any day now, really. It's like an apple tree. Once it starts to produce, it's an annual thing."
Thomas does concede that truffles require alkaline soil, and while California tends to be acidic, that's easy enough to fix by using lime. But while one tree's roots may produce a greater or lesser quantity of truffles than those of the next, the whole endeavor is really a function of the law of averages. And the dedication and know-how on the part of people like Zygielbaum lead Thomas to believe that what's been done elsewhere can be done here, with Napa's entire infrastructure of branding and distribution ready to snap into action as soon as the time comes.
Underneath our feet, up to 20 centimeters below the surface, a fungus and a root consummate their slow-motion love affair, and it's only a matter of time before an operationally conditioned dog will lay down on the ground with its nose pointing straight at the result of that dalliance. Like one of Willy Wonka's Golden Tickets, someone just has to find it. If and when they do, it's possible that at the 2017 Truffle Festival, someone will deliver a lecture titled "How I Grew the First Truffle in Napa."
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