Tuscany's white-truffle country: On the hunt for culinary gold

It is 45 years since the San Miniato Truffle Festival came into being

Digging for victory: white truffles are sold at auction for about £1,500 per kilo (AFP/Getty)

Morgan Gonzalves seems to have been built by the company responsible for the Thames Barrier. He has forearms like hams and a knife mounted on the end of a 2ft stick, slung, with some negligence, over his right shoulder. He also has a small dog that looks like a fluffy brown poodle. It is 10am and he is skipping like a mountain goat down the steep incline of the Tuscan forest we are in. He is concentrating like a man prospecting for gold, and in a sense he is doing just that, though for culinary gold: white truffles.

We are on the outer edges of the 500-hectare Villa Lena estate in Tuscany, near the village of Palaia. Perched atop a hill, it is here that Morgan works at night, as a barman mixing peach daiquiris and liberally dispensing the estate-made wine. But his passion lies in the earth and in the truffles within it.

Next week is an important time for men such as Gonzalves – and there are close to 1,500 with licenses in Tuscany, and a few more still without. It is 45 years since the San Miniato Truffle Festival came into being. Not only is it one of the best shopfronts in the world, it is also a bit of a knees-up for the hunters, with prizes awarded for the biggest truffle found and the oldest truffle hunter.

Going out with him on the estate is a singular experience. First of all because he uses a dog (it may look like a poodle but it is a Lagotto that has been trained at great expense). I was expecting a pig – and there are pigs here. I have seen them in a paddock in the olive groves. They are useless here, though. “They can smell the truffles,” says Gonzalves, “but they eat them before you can stop them.”

On a good day, Gonzalves might find as much as 600g of white truffle. Jerome Hadey, though, who owns Villa Lena with his wife Lena Evstafieva, tells me that they found 2kg earlier in the summer. “That,” he says with understatement, “was a good day.” How much of an understatement that is becomes clear when you look at the price, which bobs around €2,000 (£1,469) per kilo.

In 2010, a casino mogul from Macau called Stanley Ho spent $330,000 on two pieces of truffle weighing, cumulatively, 1.3kg. There is a premium for the bigger truffles – and if you want to eat them in Macau, it involves a flight, which needs to take place within days of them being found – but there is also a lot of willy-waving that goes on among some buyers.

P Diddy famously tells the New York chef Daniel Boulud to “shave this bitch” when he wants truffles. I refrain from asking the same of Carlos Vega, the sous chef at Villa Lena. He and his boss, Guillaume Rouxel, cook with the truffles that aren't sold on. Mercifully, to have the truffle menu costs only an extra €20 on top of the €20 I have already paid for breakfast and lunch.

There are three dishes on the menu containing truffle. But the crowning dish, the truffley apotheosis, is a beef tartare that is gently flecked with slivers of truffles. It tastes heady and musky, like mushrooms on speed.

I fear that I may not have the mountain-goat dexterity to be a hunter – but I'll sure make a white-truffle eater.