It is autumn in Tuscany. Francesco Ventroni, a truffle hunter, steps through a burnt-orange and amber-colored wood, scattering the leaf litter with his feet. His dogs bound ahead. But the little Italian valley that he knows so well is warmer and drier than it used to be at this time of year. Streams that usually run down the hillside are absent. Those leaves on the ground don’t have their usual fuzzy covering of November frost. And Ventroni is wearing a T-shirt.
As he approaches a favorite spot, where he once lifted truffles weighing nearly half a kilogram out of the moist soil, he knows those memories will not be matched today. “My dog, in his own way, looks at you and tells you to go home because there’s nothing,” says Ventroni. “You wonder how that is possible.”
The truffles that Ventroni and his well-trained dogs hunt are the knobbly fruiting bodies of fungi that live in a symbiotic relationship with trees. Lightly shaved onto pasta or eggs, or used to flavor olive oil, truffles are considered a delicacy and, yes, a luxury. Record temperatures in Europe this summer have taken a toll on truffle stocks, pushing prices for some varieties sky high, to €1,000 per kilogram or beyond.
The knack of a truffle hunter still counts for something, though. Against the odds, Ventroni has managed to unearth some reasonably large truffles this year, around 100 grams each. “I’ve been pretty lucky,” he says. Still, he found them in the few places where moisture has clung on in the ground, he adds.has revealed new details about how climate change and more frequent droughts are affecting truffles.
When lead author Brian Steidinger, at the University of Konstanz in Germany, went truffle hunting for the first time while researching the fungi, he decided to get as close to his subject as possible. Truffle hunters typically train dogs to catch the scent of truffles and reveal their locations in a forest. The Italian breed Lagotto Romagnolo is often considered the most adept at this. But Steidinger found out that human noses can detect the aroma too—at close range.
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