The Alba Truffle Fair: Inside the World's Most Famous Food Auction

Every October, in the medieval town of Alba in northern Italy, something strange happens. The population, which is ordinarily around thirty thousand, roughly triples. Restaurants that are usually well regarded but sleepy become nearly impossible to book. The narrow streets fill with chefs in white jackets, buyers with earpieces, television crews and dogs. And in a large marquee in the centre of town, a temporary market takes shape, filled with small trestle tables covered in white cloth, on which sit some of the most valuable food items on earth.

This is the Alba International White Truffle Fair, and it is, quite genuinely, the most important food event in the world you have probably never attended.

A festival almost a century old

The fair (or Fiera Internazionale del Tartufo Bianco d'Alba, as it is properly known) was launched in 1929, when the mayor of Alba decided that the town's growing reputation for white truffle deserved something more organised than word of mouth. In its early decades it was a small regional affair, attracting the trade of northern Italy and a handful of foreign restaurateurs who happened to be in the know. Over the second half of the twentieth century, as international appetite for truffle grew, so did the fair. By the 1990s it had become a genuine tourist and industry destination. Today it runs for around ten weekends every autumn, from early October to early December, mapping neatly onto the peak of the white truffle season.

What actually happens

The centre of the fair is the market. In the covered halls of the Cortile della Maddalena, dozens of licensed sellers set up small stalls where you can inspect, smell and buy fresh white and black truffles at close to source prices. The transactions are done the old-fashioned way, in cash, one truffle at a time, weighed on small brass scales. If you have never smelled a fresh Alba white truffle in a room full of them, the experience is difficult to describe. The best analogy is walking into a wine cellar full of freshly baked bread.

Around the market, the town spreads out into a food festival. There are cooking demonstrations from Michelin-starred chefs. There are truffle-hunting exhibitions in the surrounding hills, complete with performing Lagotto Romagnolo dogs. There are wine tastings, cheese pavilions, and small workshops on everything from truffle grading to the science of aroma. In the town's restaurants, tasting menus built around truffle appear on every table. In the streets, food stalls sell truffle-topped sandwiches, truffle risotto by the paper cup, and truffle-scented gelato.

Somewhere in all this, the professionals do their work. Buyers from restaurants in New York, Tokyo, London and Dubai walk the market with tin boxes and phone chargers. Chefs make deals for the season's supply over espresso. Producers meet the exporters who will send their truffles across the world for the next two months. Alba, for six weeks of the year, is the global capital of a multi-billion-euro industry.

The World Alba White Truffle Auction

The most theatrical event of the fair, and the one that gets the international press, is the Asta Mondiale del Tartufo Bianco d'Alba, the World Alba White Truffle Auction. It has been running since 1999, and it takes place every November in the Castle of Grinzane Cavour, a nineteenth-century estate a few miles outside town.

The set-up is genuinely operatic. A handful of the largest, best white truffles of the season are placed on the auction block. Bidders are connected live to satellite auction rooms in Hong Kong, Dubai and increasingly Singapore, so collectors, casinos and restaurants can bid remotely. An auctioneer in a smart suit presides. And the prices, once the paddles start going up, are the kind of numbers that make food writers reach for a calculator.

A single 900-gram Alba white truffle sold at the 2007 auction for around £165,000, purchased by a Macau casino magnate. A 1.5-kilogram truffle sold in 2010 for the equivalent of £210,000, at the time the highest price ever paid for a single truffle. More recent auctions have seen individual specimens go for €140,000 and up to bidders in Hong Kong. Every year the record shifts. Every year the proceeds go to charity, which is part of the point.

What all this actually means

At one level, the Alba fair is a highly efficient trade event that fixes prices, moves stock and connects producers to buyers for the entire white truffle season. At another level, it is a piece of theatre that reminds the world truffle is worth caring about. The Michelin chef who flies in to buy his season's supply is doing serious work. The couple from Milan who queue for an hour to eat a truffle panino are participating in the same ritual, just at a different scale.

It also explains why Alba, a small provincial town in the Piedmont hills, has become synonymous with the world's most expensive ingredient. The white truffle grows in many places. The market that decides what it is worth exists in one.

Why it matters to your kitchen

You are unlikely to be in Alba this November. Most people who eat truffle regularly never make the pilgrimage. But every jar of Italian truffle product on your shelf, from our Signature Truffle Dust and White Truffle Oil to the Italian Minced Truffle recently added to our range, exists inside the market that the Alba fair sets. Prices, availability, quality standards, and even the way individual producers grade their harvest all trace back, in some part, to what happens at those trestle tables in October.

The next time you sprinkle a pinch of truffle dust over eggs on a Sunday, or drizzle a little truffle oil over pasta, know that somewhere behind it, in a market hall in northern Italy, a man in an oilskin coat is quietly negotiating the year's supply. And once a year, in a castle down the road, someone in Hong Kong is paying a small fortune for the biggest truffle he can find. The story of the ingredient you are eating runs, in the end, straight through that marquee in Alba