Now I'm imagining a Truffle Mafia/ Mushroom Cartel, with mushroom goon squads, fungi warehouses, and done up in gaudy suits & ostentatious furs.
It was a surprisingly decent flick.
It exists in Italy and France, who cash in on the point of origin of truffles, but it's a total free-for-all in Croatia where truffles can be had for remarkably cheap by contrast in Istria.
I'm told when everything was shut down in 2020 they were practically giving them away in Croatia since the prices collapsed without anything but a small local demand to sustain it, and how Italian vendors were finding ways to cross and take the excess supply to artificially maintain the prices and avoid arbitrage, now this is all speculative and needs to be taken with a grain of salt, but I know from personal experience from running a kitchen in Istria that black truffles late into the winter season can be had for a pittance than whatever can be found out of season in the Spring/Summer/Fall because most local restaurants are closed and the hassle of exporting them is often not worth the trouble of just offloading them despite EU membership (this was in 2013 when it had just joined).
In many ways I think this will be one of the few Industry's to benefit from Schengen the most now that Croatia is entering it in 2023, before you had to wait in a rather long line to cross, but now a quick trip 1-2 hour round trip from Koper or Triste (all with decent plane/train options) can be the only thing that is required to take advantage of this price arbitrage in the Winter and then pass them off as Italian and a significant markup.
You can likely pay a Croatian to negotiate and settle a price with the vendor and then have them drive/bus to Italy or Slovenia for less than what it takes to buy locally despite the high fuel prices right now because of this markup--which to me is reminiscent of how it was cheaper to import grain from Egypt and bake the bread than it was to have a local do so in Rome during the height of the empire.
It’s expensive because you need a huge amount of land, it only produces for a few weeks, and you can have years with almost no production. The cartel was created to protect producers against those huge variation of supply from years to years.
At one stage I was the northern most producer of truffles (very few produced actually but I only had 40 trees and didn't really look after them to the utmost detail) in the southern hemisphere, then a guy 150km further north, and in soil that was near total sand, got some to grow. This was totally unexpected.
It seems the conditions required are not quite so special as thought, and some totally unsuited conditions (as previously thought) might be good due to reduced competition from other fungi.
The action of inoculating trees is simple as well, get a ripe couple of real truffles, blender them up and pour it over the small saplings in pots, if the mycorrhizal sets in you can see it as white bits on the roots. (I think you need two, but not even sure on that).
A wide range of trees will work, oak, hazel, cork to name a few. There is a preferred pH range for the soil, as would be expected for all fungi pH has a strong role to play.
There has been a lot of secrecy enshrouding the whole game for a long time.
I refer only to Tuber melanosporum in the above, I am not sure anyone has been able to get the white truffles growing out of the wild, there will be some special condition or symbiosis with an animal or something that is needed, but not understood yet.