Drought kills fortunes from French truffle

AUPS, France — Philippe Daniel opens a slim briefcase so buyers can glimpse his wares, then snaps it shut with a wary glance over his shoulder.

Daniel is not dealing in contraband but in truffles — tubers prized for their heady fragrance and rich, earthy flavor.

One of the world's most sought-after gastronomical treasures, truffles fetch astronomical prices, and sellers like Daniel are always alert for spying competitors.

Daniel used to deal in big quantities. But for the past five years, drought has been parching the Var region of southeast France as well as truffle-producing regions in Italy and Spain. Today, Daniel can fit his entire weekly harvest in a single plastic bag.

He's not the only one.

Organizers at the market in the Var village of Aups, where Daniel plies his wares, have had to suspend the weekly wholesale auction, where middlemen used to bid tens of thousands of dollars for mounds of truffles. These days there simply aren't enough of the fragrant fungi.

Sales shrink

Now, foodies and tourists buying truffles by the piece have replaced the bulk-buying middlemen, and most transactions are in grams.

At the Aups market, the black truffle's price has more than doubled over the past five years, to about $560 a pound.

Farmers say production is down 50 to 75 percent this winter. They blame global warming, warning that if thermometers keep rising, France's black truffle will one day be just a memory.

This is not the first time weather has caused a dramatic downturn in French truffle production. A severe drought in the early '60s more than halved the harvest, bringing it down to about 50 tons.

But the trufficulteurs, as truffle farmers are known, contend this current dry spell is longer and more acute.

Production in France has been in slow decline for 100 years — from 1,000 tons a year to just 50 tons, according to the Agriculture Ministry — under the march of urban sprawl into the fungus' forest habitat and the migration of farming folk to cities.

Truffles grow underground, in the root systems of host trees. Shriveled, black-skinned and egg-shaped, they are hard to distinguish from clods of dirt.

Specially trained dogs sniff and dig them out, and are rewarded with doggy treats. Pigs — bigger, hungrier and harder to manage — have largely fallen out of favor.

Families jealously guard the whereabouts of the richest corners of the forest. Wealthier producers surround their plantations with electric fencing to discourage wild boars and poachers.

Chefs have for centuries used truffles to dress up all sorts of dishes, from creamy sauces to scrambled eggs.

The 18th- and 19th-century French epicurean Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously called the truffle the "diamond of the kitchen" and hailed it as an aphrodisiac that "makes women more tender and men more amiable."

Truffles need just the right amount of rain at just the right time: Too little desiccates them; too much drowns them.

With annual rainfall in the Var down from around 40 inches in 1996 to less than half that last year, Aups' once-abundant wild truffles have all but disappeared.

The drought also has hit production elsewhere in France and in Europe's other main truffle-producing regions, in Spain and Italy. Croatia and Belgium also produce truffles in smaller quantities, as do North Carolina and Oregon.

Last year, the harvest of Italy's prized white truffle was down as much as 75 percent from 2006, according to Andrea Rosin, the head of truffle-export company Tartufingros.

Spain's 2007 black-truffle harvest was down more than half from five years earlier, said Daniel Oliach, of a growers' association in the northeastern region of Catalonia.

Irrigation needed

Nowadays, the trufficulteurs say, only truffles cultivated in irrigated plantations have much of a chance of surviving the sunbaked summers.

Climate scientists say it is too early to link the drought to global warming, but point to computer models that suggest the entire Mediterranean basin is getting warmer and dryer.

The Met Office, Britain's weather agency, says that by 2030, Mediterranean rainfall is expected to be down by one-quarter, and annual average air temperatures are likely to rise in Europe by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit by 2080.

Changing climate could mean changing truffle terrain. Already, producers in the Southern Hemisphere and in China are making inroads.

France imported 33 tons of fresh or frozen truffles from China in 2007. At less than $20 a pound, the Chinese variety is far cheaper than European truffles, but Aups trufficulteur Lucien Barbaroux says he's sure his customers can tell the difference.

"Our clients here are now connoisseurs and they're not about to be duped," he said. "They know how to recognize the real stuff."