The excellent news is that we have remade contact with Christelle Nominé and her fabulous dog, Taora. Claude Boyer, one of Christelle’s pupils, put us in touch again after a gap of three years. Christelle and Taora have won the French truffle hunting championship as well as being runner up and have again made this season’s final to be held later in February. Taora is now twelve and doesn’t quite have the stamina she used to (why does that sound familiar?) and so Christelle brought along her successor, two year old Horphée, who is still not yet fully experienced. Claude brought his dog, Corso, who is a veteran of two previous hunts at Le Gardian, so we had a pretty powerful team. However, despite the talent on show we still didn’t find any truffles. Christelle was quite optimistic about some brûlées but felt that the soil had been over-compacted in our endeavours to keep the truffière looking good for visitors. So we will be griffing the whole area this spring to a depth of 2 or 3cm – enough to lighten the texture a little but not deep enough to damage the truffle mycelium.

You can find some pictures of the truffle hunt on the "Newsletters" page.

Truffle Hunting Pictures

And a video here.

Taora gets excited video