The official name is “Biodiversity and truffle cultivation” but everyone simplifies it with “truffle department”. Obviously, this is not the only delegation that Marco Gallo, a 54-year-old dentist from Busca, in the province of Cuneo, has to worry about. Starting in the next few days, he will also be in charge of extracting the precious white tuber, the gold of Alba.
Of course, he will also have to decide on something else: the main delegation is that of the mountains and the snow system, starting from the Olympic Alps of the Susa Valley. But certainly the most fascinating task is that of governing the truffle system.
«I approach this new administrative experience with enthusiasm», commented Gallo upon the announcement of the delegations.
And who can blame him? While in the Peninsula thousands of labor councilors at every institutional level go crazy chasing entrepreneurs and unions to deal with dramatic corporate crises, the idea of dealing with the “search” for truffles, that’s what it’s called, is actually exciting. But there’s no need to be funny: in Piedmont, truffles are an important business, which employs thousands of people and attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists from all over the world. The prices of white truffles, the most prized in the world, depend on the year, on how the harvest went and lately also on the drought. The prices in recent years have varied between 2,500 and 4,500 euros per kilo. One of the most expensive truffles on the market. But prices can rise significantly for particular types of product.
Last November, the world auction held in Alba a few weeks after the fair dedicated to the prized product of the Langa land, sold two twin truffles weighing a total of two kilos for 130,000 euros. The usual anonymous buyer from Hong-Khong bought them to bring them to the table of some rich admirer. Much of the proceeds from the global auction go to charity. Liliana Allena, president of the Truffle Fair, explains: «If we add up the proceeds of all these years we have reached a total of almost seven million donations. Depending on the different countries, these sums are donated to local charitable organizations.”
The rich Chinese obviously makes the news but he is not the soul of the truffle system. It is certainly an excellent showcase but the real economic effects are instead the hundreds of thousands of tourists, mostly foreigners, who come to the Langhe every year, attracted by the finest wines (Barolo and Nebiolo) and the white tuber. The peak of visits is between October and November: in those two months each food and wine tourist spends between 220 and 250 euros a day on food. To these figures must naturally be added the overnight stays in hotels.
A turnover that in two months reaches a turnover of 250 million for the truffle market alone. And that presumably, including overnight stays and wine purchases, can exceed one billion euros in the nine weeks of greatest presence. The white truffle supply chain alone creates over 11 thousand jobs in Alba and the surrounding towns. The calculations of those responsible for the Truffle Fair say that for every euro invested in the sector, 55 are returned in turnover. In short, there is enough to justify the creation of a delegation for Councilor Gallo.
The Langhe gold mine also needs maintenance. The main problem to solve is drought. From this year the “search” has been postponed by ten days, from September 21st to October 1st. All to avoid the 4 thousand trifulau, authorized hunters with a card collect a product that is not yet ripe, thus compromising the harvest of subsequent years. The sale of the cards alone, which cost around 100 euros, yields around half a million, a sum that the Region uses to plant new trees and create new cultivation areas.
The postponement of the start of the harvest, and therefore of the sale of the new truffles in the restaurants of the Langa, will be accompanied by a sort of decade of preparation: conferences, exhibitions, concerts, along the lines of the alternative activities organized by the mountain municipalities when the snow is slow to fall.
The fact that the reconfirmed governor of Piedmont, Alberto Cirio, was mayor of Alba and in turn holder of the truffle delegation in the center-right government of Roberto Cota, explains why Cirio II also chose to replicate the experiment. And it also explains why the chosen one comes from one of the civic lists promoted by the governor. In short, Alba is holding on tightly to the government of its gold mine.
