Sacred Sierra by Jason Webster Page B

its own television channel, and the cameras were there to record this, perhaps the most important event of the year.
    ‘That’s Santiago Reyna,’ Vicente whispered loudly in my ear as we tried in vain to keep warm: there was no sign of autumn up here, I noticed, late summer having passed directly to midwinter by the feel of things. ‘He’s the biggest authority on truffles in the whole of Spain!’
    I pulled my thin jacket tighter to try and keep in the heat: at that moment the only expert I wanted to see was one on thermodynamics.
    I knew next to nothing about truffles, and was not even sure I’d ever tried one. But Vicente, a grinning twenty-year-old with an Afro of bright curly red hair studying forestry science at Valencia University, had assured me in no uncertain terms that this was the future – and an ideal venture for our new farm. Glancing around the hall at the dozen or so other participants, all wrapped up in scarves and hats against the cold, I had my doubts. If he was right, the rest of Spain had yet to catch on.
    It appeared as if the organisers of the event were waiting for more people to show up, but after a delay of about an hour, they finally decided to start. Vicente pulled out his exercise book and pen, breathing on his fingers to try and warm them up.
    ‘I want to study with this guy,’ he said, his eyes glazing over as Santiago, a well-fed, middle-aged man with an air of authority stood up to address the meagre audience. ‘There’s nothing he doesn’t know about truffles.’
    Over the course of the next couple of hours, he and his colleagues helped lighten some of the darkness of my truffle ignorance.
    The most famous kind of truffle, I learned, was the white variety –
tuber magnatum
– which was only ever found in northern Italy. This is the one that often makes it into newspaper articles, where
x
(famous person or restaurant) is reported to have spent
y
(ridiculous amount of money) for
z
(tiny morsel of the stuff). It is very rare, being almost impossible to cultivate artificially or farm.
    Black truffles –
tuber melanosporum
– sometimes called black winter truffles, are not quite as expensive but are very much sought after and can command impressive amounts of money. They are most commonly found in southern France and here in north-eastern Spain and are not to be confused with Chinese truffles –
tuber sinensis
– which look similar but taste of nothing and are often used by unscrupulous suppliers to bulk out their wares by placing a real truffle at the top of the jar for the smell so that no one can tell the difference. The advantage of black truffles is that – unlike their white cousins – they can, to some extent, be cultivated. Through a process called mycorrhisation, spores can be impregnated into the roots of a baby tree. Often this is a variety of oak, but hazelnut and other species can also be used. Several years after planting – anything up to ten years – they start producing their first yield. Specially trained pigs or dogs are needed to find this elusive crop, which grows a foot or so under the ground and is almost invisible to the human eye owing to its soil-like colour.
    Thankfully, the speakers pitched their talks at the relatively ignorant, which seemed to be most of us in the hall. In France, we were told, truffi-culture was far more advanced. The French had set up websites selling this ‘black gold’, allowing them a huge mark-up on the wholesale price. They even had fluffy truffle toys for the kids of truffle-scoffing parents. Oohs and aahs of respect emanated from the huddled farmers around. Those Frenchies always were a clever, sophisticated lot. Trust them to have thought of something like that.
    With that, and a couple more mini-talks on technical aspects of truffle cultivation that sailed right over my head, the conference came to an end. In that sleepy lull that comes immediately after a talk or lecture, I discovered that Vicente was no longer