Chapter One · The Place
Sarrión.
Teruel.
A village of 1,100 souls in the southern highlands of the Spanish province of Teruel — and the world's undisputed capital of black truffle.
I. The Land
A continental climate at one thousand meters.
The province of Teruel sits at the eastern edge of the Iberian System, a high tableland of limestone soils, holm oaks and dry cold winters. Sarrión, in its southern tip, lies at roughly 990 meters of altitude — the perfect height for the symbiosis between oak and Tuber melanosporum.
The soil is alkaline, the rain measured, the summers warm and the winters firm. Together with the neighbouring municipalities of Mora de Rubielos, Manzanera and Albentosa, Sarrión forms what local growers simply call la comarca de la trufa — the truffle county.
This corner of Teruel produces nearly forty percent of the world's black truffle every season. It is, by any honest measure, the most important square of land on Earth for our craft.
IV. The People
We know every grower by name.
Our network of growers is small by design. A dozen families across the Teruel highlands, most of them third- or fourth-generation, working plots of fifteen to forty hectares.
We pay above market, in cash, on the day. In exchange, we get the first look at the morning's harvest, and the right to refuse anything that does not meet our standard. Refusals are rare. Most of what comes out of these forests is, in plain words, exceptional.
990 m
Average altitude · Sarrión
~40 %
World share · Teruel comarca
12
Allocated grower families
Nov–Mar
Harvest season
V. The Object
No two are the same.
That is the point.
Each truffle is brushed, weighed and matched to an order by hand. The imperfections are part of the contract. We refuse to make the forest look industrial.
From the limestone of Teruel,
to a kitchen in your city —
one continuous gesture.