2023 Italy Day 16

By travelerdon on September 26, 2023

Trequanda, Apr 5 Truffle Hunt

Today is the reason we booked this trip in the first place! But our hunt isn’t until 3PM. So we get up at 9AM and head out to visit Pienza which was cut short a couple days ago because of our small bout with food poisoning! We visit the Duomo at the top of the city and find breakfast. As we walk around, we find a wine tasting in the center of town. So we try out more Tuscan wines!

Then we head out and check out a castle that we have passed by several times and this time we drive in and it turns out to have the best wine tasting of the trip! FREE! so we taste several wines and I buy a bottle of their best one which is only 21 Euros! We can’t believe our luck! Then we go back to our villa for an hours rest before our hunt starts!

We finish our visit to the castle, which has some fun statues that are clearly very old along with some other very old relics and we drive away past an olive orchard!

Promptly at 3PM, we meet Andrea, our Hunter, and only one other couple is with us with their 10 year old daughter. They are Leon, Vera and daughter Marie from Tarzana, CA, a mere hour drive from where we live! We’ll need to stay in touch! We follow Andrea down the road a kilometer or two and park. Andrea releases her truffle dog, Mia, but the dog answers to the name “Puppy” which is only a puppy but seems to know it’s stuff. We walk off into the woods following Puppy and soon enough, she is digging at the ground. Yes! A truffle! I will go into more depth on the kinds of truffles but for now, we have found truffles! All in all, the puppy finds 47 grams of truffles (as weighed later) which is about 23 Euros worth, plenty enough for dinner for 4! Our hunter throws in a black truffle she found this morning and we have 60 grams!

There are 3 basic kinds of Truffles, Marzuolo (found in the spring and the ones we find today!), Tartufo Estivo O Scorzone (Black Truffles, found in the summer and fall mostly) and Tartufo Bianco (White Truffles, found in the fall into winter)

Andrea gives the truffles to our chef, Giovanna, for the evening, and we all agree to meet at 7:15PM for dinner. So we go back to our room and relax until then. We have a couple hours and I even get a nap in! We all meet at the agreed time and are ushered into the dining room and get seated at the table. Our truffle mates are a Russian couple, Leon, Vera and daughter Marie, that happen to live in Tarzana, CA and we get along famously! So much so that those of you that live local to us may even get to meet them one day as they are now on our invite list!

The meal is fabulous and every course includes truffles! We ask what the courses are but no one speaks English! So the photos will have to suffice! Dessert is the only course that doesn’t use truffles and we feign mock disappointment and everyone laughs! Then they serve us Grappa, which Elee and I have been dying to try. It is a sweet Anisette, licorice flavored after dinner drink, which is interesting but I probably won’t order again! Strong!