Dante’s Beach, Ravenna
Maria, the boisterous new vizsla who gives the old one, Rocco, such a hard time, was in big trouble. She had killed one of our seven chickens, Gertrude, by biting her head off.
Two of our six children – Caterina (22) and Rita (16) – wanted to dump Maria for good at the dog rescue centre immediately, or else take her back to the breeder we’d got her from in the hills.
Giovanni Maria (14), who is able to identify each chicken and lets Giulia, his favourite, sit on his shoulder like a parrot, buried the dead Gertrude near where the tortoises used to live. He was gutted.
Vizslas are a very fast, semi-aquatic, medium-sized breed of hunting dog, specialists in chasing game and waterfowl, and as such Maria does tend to drool at the sight of anything with wings. But she knew the score: she is not to touch those chickens.
So we let her off, telling ourselves that the decapitation of Gertrude was a one-off. This led us by a simple quirk of fate to a discovery that is potentially great news for us – and perhaps also for the chickens.
The other day, on a whim, my eldest son, Francesco Winston (20), bought a packet of cappelletti filled with tartufo at the supermarket. He wanted to see how Maria would react. He slashed open a tennis ball with a knife, put a cappelletto inside and approached Maria, opening the gash in the ball when he got near, to ensure she got a good whiff. She went wild, squealing in ecstasy. A clear sign that she has what it takes.
On Boxing Day when I was a child, my father used to take me and my brother Simon, who is one year younger than me, beagling. This Boxing Day, Francesco Winston staged a demonstration in our garden of what Maria is capable of as a trainee truffle dog.
The world of truffles is full of secrecy and treachery. Dogs get kidnapped, or killed with poison
He shut her inside the house and buried ten cappelletti al tartufo in the soil beneath trees dotted about the very large garden. He then let her out. ‘Where is it, Maria?’ he said. ‘‘Where’s the tartufo?’ And we watched as she moved quietly – dare I say professionally – among the trees, with her nose glued to the ground.
‘Her nose makes a ticking sound as she moves about,’ Francesco Winston said. ‘Like a Geiger counter.’
Within no time at all, and with no prompting, she dug up her first cappelletto underneath a mulberry tree. Within a quarter of an hour she had found the lot.
Truffles are big business. The prized white truffle from Alba in Piedmont, whose season runs from the start of October to the end of December, costs this year between €2,100 and €3,500 a kilo, according to one source.
By the time it arrives in America, the price has shot up fivefold to $18,473 a kilo (€15,690), which means a 30g white truffle – barely enough for four portions of pasta – costs about $500 (€425). In the Romagna, where we are, the white truffle is just as good but not as famous and costs up to one third less.
So during the truffle season, when I sink what are left of my teeth into a bruschetta al tartufo bianco at €15 a time, I think: ‘Sod the teeth, this is the life!’
As truffles weigh next to nothing, and take up very little space, they cost hardly anything to transport. Nor would the business require much capital investment, as Maria would be supplying the product. No need for an office either.
I had always thought it would be a great business idea to export truffles from the Romagna to restaurants in Britain. But I never got round to doing anything about it.
Anyway, my idea was merely to buy the truffles from local truffle hunters and export those; never to find them myself. Now? Apparently, a single dog can find thousands of truffles in a season. Calmi!
There is only one breed recognised as a specialist truffle hound and it is from my neck of the woods, the lagotto romagnolo, which looks a bit like a cockapoo. Last spring, the Queen gave the King one which he called Snuff. This took place just before their state visit to Italy during which they came to Ravenna.
But vizslas are not just much better-looking dogs; they are said to be just as good at rootling out truffles.
The next step will be to let Maria loose in the pine forest on the coast a mile from our house to see if she is able to find a real truffle – and then we must stop her wolfing it down. The forest here does not contain the white truffle. Instead, it has only the bianchetto – the little white – which is inferior and far cheaper. But so what? We are learning. To find the white truffle we will have to go 25 miles inland into the hills. But there is no point jumping ahead.
The world of truffles is full of secrecy and treachery. Hunters refuse even to tell their best friends or wives where they find their truffles, and sometimes even refuse to tell their sons before they die. Dogs, meanwhile, get kidnapped, or killed with poison.
Indeed, there is little point even thinking about it in commercial terms at this stage. Let’s just see how it goes. What would be nice, though, is if Maria were to become so keen on truffles that she lost her appetite for chickens.
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