Alba Truffle Festival 2006

We visited the truffle festival in Alba today. We resisted the temptation to buy the €5 wine tasting ticket when we went the truffle exhibition as we felt unlimited wine sampling on a warm Sunday afternoon could be a bad idea, particularly as one of us had to drive home at the end of it! We wandered round the stalls in the large marquee erected specially for the festival, the pungent aroma of truffles following us as we went. There were lots of stalls selling local wines & produce, many with a truffle theme. You could buy everything from genuine white truffles (closely guarded by men dressed as truffle hunters) to truffle rice, truffle cheese, truffle pasta & truffle paste.

There was also a medieval re-enactment on today with all the different borghi (districts or hamlets) of the town displaying stalls with food, wine, produce & activities. We saw stalls selling produce including cheese, salami, honey & wine and food stalls selling polenta, sausages, stew, roast meat, pizza, pasta, cakes and mulled wine. There were also lots of stalls with games & activities everything from throwing darts at a salami, hooking bottles of wine with fishing rods and climbing though a web of string without ringing the bell to jumping up and down on a pretend horse which in turn inflated a balloon, the object being the first to burst the balloon won the prize (yet more wine!).

Alba was absolutely heaving, the busiest we’ve seen it, but a really great atmosphere & definitely more Italian tourists than foreigners. Everyone was eating & drinking, impossible not to really, so we decided to sample some polenta & cinghiale (wild boar) stew & some local red wine, it was delicious! Also a glass of mulled wine which was lovely, we did manage to resist the cake & chocolate sauce though.