Summer in the Trufferie

We get asked a lot if we take a break in summer. Hardly! Truffles may be harvested in winter but that doesn’t mean that things aren’t happening in the background.

While we can’t harvest truffles in summer we spend time tending the trends, weeding and trimming and keeping the Truffiere in tip top shape. For us a happy hazel nut tree means a happy growing truffle!

Summer is the time of year where we spend a lot of time waiting for the cool weather and the first appearance of the truffles.

Truffles – not to be confused with the chocolate truffle you may have eaten too much of at Christmas – are a group of valuable and highly sought-after edible species of underground ascomycetes. That means truffles are a fungus, just like mushrooms.

The French black truffle, the type that we cultivate at our Truffière in Manjimup, is the fruiting body of the fungus Tuber melanosporum. This fungus forms a symbiotic relationship with the roots of oak and hazel trees.

So it’s all those hazelnuts trees at our Manjimup property, currently green and lush in the summer that provide the home for our precious Australian truffles.

Truffles grow in the soil around trees that have the truffle mycelium growing on their roots. In some parts of the world, truffles occur naturally. In other areas, such as the cultivated plantation we have established in Manjiump, the host trees are inoculated with the truffle fungus and planted in what becomes known as a Truffière.

Several possible host trees for black truffles exist, including the common European hazelnut. The first truffles should appear the sixth or seventh year after planting. Truffle dogs are specially trained to locate them (by sniffing them out) during the winter.

Today, 12 years after it was planted The Wine & Truffle Co’s Manjimup Truffière now produces the largest quantity of truffles from one property in the Southern Hemisphere during the winter months, from late May to mid August 2009.

So as you can see, there is lots happening in the cycle of truffle growing all year round. We couldn’t take a break in summer as it’s a time of year that people love to visit Manjimup and we love to see our guests at the cellar door all year round.