Provenance
Every truffle has a story. This is the provenance story of the truffles in your box: the ground they grew in, the region the farm belongs to, and the hunter and dog who found them on a representative morning's hunt.
The harvest
The farm
The orchard was planted twelve years ago. Its oaks were inoculated before they went into the ground, and one family has tended them since, on a hillside of thin, pale, stony soil on the lower slopes below Monte Subasio.
A truffle lives on the roots of its host tree, somewhere in the top 4–6 inches, and it changes the ground above it. It suppresses whatever tries to grow near the trunk until a bare patch forms — hunters call it the brûlé, the burn. That scorched-looking ring is one of the oldest ways to read an orchard from standing height. The fungus, in effect, advertises itself.
We keep the exact location private, for the same reason truffle hunters have kept their ground private for centuries. Everything else is here: the ground itself, the hunter, the dog, and the region that shaped all three.
The pair
Argo is a Lagotto Romagnolo, the curly-coated Italian water dog that has been put to this work for a few hundred years. He finds a truffle purely by scent. Ivano reads Argo's body language. Together, they find what nothing else can.
On the morning of October 8, between 7:15 and 8:07, the two of them worked this orchard and found what is now in your box.
The film below shows Ivano and Argo working this farm — same orchard, same hunter, same dog. It wasn't filmed the morning your truffles came out of the ground, but the ground, the work, and the pair are the same.
The region
Umbria sits in the middle of Italy, the only region on the peninsula that touches no sea. Monte Subasio rises out of it: a single rounded mountain of about 4,230 feet, standing apart from the ridge behind it, shaped like a turtle's back.
Two towns sit on its flanks. Assisi is on the western side at around 1,390 feet, built by the Romans on terraces cut into the mountain. Spello lies about six miles south and lower, near 920 feet, on a ridge running down toward the plain. Its Roman walls still stand along much of the lower town, pierced by three ancient gates. It was called Hispellum, and people were gathering on that ground by at least the third century BC.
Assisi is perhaps best known as the birthplace of Francis — born there around 1181, son of a cloth merchant, who gave away his inheritance in the town square and founded an order built on voluntary poverty and a reverence for the natural world as sacred. His Canticle of the Sun, written near Assisi at the end of his life, addresses the earth's elements as kin: Brother Wind, Sister Water. The Basilica built in his honor two years after his death contains the Giotto frescoes — the paintings that first put real landscape behind human figures. The hills Giotto painted are the hills outside.
Umbria has been known for its black truffles for as long as anyone has bothered to write it down. The heartland lies south along the same line of hills: the prized black truffle here carries the names of two towns, nero di Norcia e Spoleto. Spoleto is roughly eighteen miles down that escarpment from Spello, and Norcia about twenty-five miles beyond it, up in the folded limestone of the Valnerina. This farm sits at the northern end of the same spine of rock.
These slopes have been worked without interruption for centuries. In 2018 the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization designated the olive groves running between Assisi and Spoleto a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System — recognition of a terraced hillside agriculture, tended by hand, that has survived largely intact. It was the first such designation in Italy, and the strip it covers passes directly through Spello.
Three years later UNESCO added Italian truffle hunting to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Not the truffle — the hunting. What was recognized is a body of knowledge handed on by mouth for centuries: how to read weather and ground and vegetation, how to use a narrow spade that lifts a truffle without wrecking the soil it came from, and, named explicitly in the citation, the relationship between a hunter and a dog.
Ivano and Argo are what that citation is describing.
A note on how they look
For us, aroma comes before appearance, every time. The most fragrant truffle in a morning's harvest is rarely the best-looking one, and where the two compete against each other we follow the nose.
Even, well-formed truffles matter to a chef shaving at the table, where the truffle is part of what the guest sees. In a home kitchen, aroma is flavor, and flavor is the whole point. A truffle can be lumpy, lopsided and plainly rustic, and still be the best one in the basket because of its aroma.
The film
From Ivano and Argo, and all of us at American Truffle Company —
Buon appetito.