in the forest

Biba has found something. She paws frantically at the ground, burrowing through a claggy layer of mulch to get to the dark earth beneath. With one sharp command from her master, she stops and sits, white-whiskered face turned up in expectation.

‘My mother is a child of the forest,’ says Daniela Puh, as Anita Zigante – the mother in question – gets to her knees and prods at the soil with a small spade. ‘She has been doing this since she was not even six years old.’ Springing back to her feet, Anita reveals her treasure. Sitting in her hand is a knobbly brown lump the size of a two-pence piece: a white truffle. 

The tuber is found in Croatia’s Istria and in Italy, during a season that lasts from September to January, and it is prized throughout the world. The truffles that Anita and Daniela find in the forests around their home will end up on restaurant tables from Tokyo to New York – and, of course, on the menus of every restaurant in Istria itself.

The region is so proud of its truffle heritage that the nearby hilltop town of Buzet has declared itself ‘city of truffles’. In autumn, pumpkins and gourds decorate the doorsteps of its crumbling stone houses, laundry drying between their shuttered windows. Every tavern has a festive truffle menu, advertising mushroom soup with truffles, gnocchi with truffles, pork with truffles, polenta with truffles, cheese with truffles. A noticeboard advertises the annual truffle festival, celebrated with a special truffle song and a giant dish of scrambled eggs with truffle (ingredients: 1,999 eggs, 13kg white truffles). 

Daniela is the sixth generation of her family to work in the business, organising distribution around the world from smart, modern premises on the edge of their private forest. In the tasting room and shop, hunting dogs barking in the pens outside, truffles are sold in every way you might possibly conceive: whole, sliced, flaked, creamed, dried; in pastes, oils, chocolate, crisps and beer. On the day I visit, a large truffle is packed up in wood shavings, awaiting delivery to a restaurant in Sweden – a misshapen clod worth a mere €8,000.

It wasn’t always like this. When Croatia was part of communist Yugoslavia, business was banned, and the family would drive to Italy with carefully hidden truffles to furtively sell to local trattorias. Anita once found a truffle weighing 960g and that, too, was smuggled across the border. ‘If you found one like that now, you would tell everyone,’ says Daniela with a laugh. ‘You would call in the news broadcasters!’

The constant is their deep-rooted passion for the woods. ‘I just need the forest and two dogs to find peace,’ says Daniela as we continue our hunt, winding between poplar, hornbeam, oak and wild hazelnut trees. Biba and Nika dart around, tails raised like masts, snouts to the floor, under constant encouragement from Anita. Every few minutes they find a white or black truffle, from tiny pieces too small to bother with to egg-sized clusters. We follow their zigzagging trail, pushing through the thicket, slithering up and down muddy slopes and leaping over streams, leaves scrunching beneath our wellies. It’s hard to keep up in the day, and it’s difficult to imagine standing much chance in the thick of night, when truffle-hunting generally takes place, to allow the dogs to focus on the olfactory task in hand. 

‘My mother goes out every night during white truffle season, from midnight to 8am, even when it’s cold, it’s wet, it’s foggy,’ says Daniela as we emerge back onto the road, surprised to find the day is bright and sunny after a couple of hours in the mottled gloom of the woods. ‘She is 64 and could retire now, but she won’t – the forest is in her blood.’

on the terraces

In the early morning, the streets of Oprtalj are quiet, and I wander its higgledy-piggledy cobbled lanes alone, peering into the old loggia, its stone floor polished by centuries of footfall, and meandering onto terraces planted with sweetcorn, blackberries, tomatoes and grapevines. Slithers of mist lurk over the surrounding forests; from somewhere within, a tawny owl calls, sending an unseen dog into a furious fit of barking. 

The murmur of voices begins to drift out of open windows as villagers prepare for the day. The church bell dongs mournfully on the hour, its illuminated tower-top crucifix putting up a decent fight for celestial supremacy against the bright, full moon. By sunrise, people are already at work in the fields, clambering up stepladders to pluck olives and apples from the trees and puttering along single-track lanes on tiny tractors. 

The Ipša family are among them. A short drive down from the plateau on which Oprtalj sits, their farm perches on the side of the hill, the Mirna valley stretching far below and the conical mounds of hilltop villages rising into a hazy sky. The family’s truffle-hunting puppy – still in training – bounds excitedly round its pen, eager to be petted. I sit on a vine-draped terrace, attempting not to be distracted by the view or the dog, as Irene Ipša brings out a tray of extra-virgin olive oils. It’s harvest time, and the wood-beamed storage room is crammed with tanks of oil, some of the 6,000 or so litres they produce each year.

‘We started in 1998,’ says Irene, pouring green Leccino into thimble-sized cups. ‘Until then it was almost forest up to the house. So many people left the area. Fifty years ago, there were no roads, no electricity, no water here. But we decided to plant, not leave.’ We warm the oil in our hands, inhale and taste. The Leccino, made from olives picked this year, smells of freshly mown grass and has a light, delicate flavour with a hint of pepper. ‘Olive oil is super. You work with it until you press it and then you have fresh oil the next day. It is not like wine,’ says Irene, moving onto an older Frantoio, the liquid the colour of honey. ‘The old people here like to say the olive tree is like your mother – even if you forget about it, you still will get olives. The vineyard is your wife – if you do not take good care of it, you will not get anything!’

Even so, there’s no denying the work that goes into making an olive oil that ranks among the world’s best. The family now owns 3,500 hectares, and Irene’s son Ivan offers to take me to one where the harvest is still ongoing. The plot is a half-hour drive away along quiet lanes curving through thick forest and past small hamlets where the only sign of life is a roaming goat or chicken. The flat grassy field is far removed from the steeply banked terraces of the farm, with neat lines of olive trees stretching in each direction. 

It’s lunchtime, and the pickers sit on upturned crates eating bread and cheese, seeking shade on an unseasonably hot day under the canopy of the trees. ‘I’ve been working with my parents for 12 years and never, until now, have I searched for the shadow during the harvest,’ says Ivan. ‘Normally we look for a little bit of sun.’ 

Picking up a pole with forks at one end, he pushes it high into one of the trees. He switches it on, and there is a downpour of green and black olives, the fork’s vibrations shaking them into a wide net at the base of the tree. ‘This place is easy to work, compared to the terraces,’ Ivan says. ‘But even so it is three months of pushing, pushing, pushing. You have to be ready to harvest at any moment. It is very hard to do this job without love!’ 

Once picked, the olives are cleaned and taken to the press in Buje town; during busy times, it’s a trip Ivan makes three times a day. From there, the bottles are sent to Germany, Japan, the USA and beyond. The Ipšas’ favourite place for people to try their olive oil, though, is on that terrace near Oprtalj, listening to the dog bark and gazing at those magnificent views.

in the vineyards

‘Over there,’ says Nikola Benvenuti, pointing north, ‘there is the Ipšas’ farm.’ I can just make out a beige and white tumble of buildings far up in the hills. We are standing in one of Nikola’s vineyards, San Salvatore, on the other side of the valley to Irene and Ivan’s terraces. The hilltop town of Motovun rises up between us, cartoonish in its perfection, with a row of medieval stone buildings curling up the hillside to end at
a rectangular bell tower. It’s early evening, and visitors will be leaving its gourmet food shops clutching bags of truffle paste and olive oil to claim their spot at a restaurant terrace with a glass of lstrian wine. 

Some of it started life in the fields where we stand, made by three generations of the Benvenuti family since 1946. The harvest on the gently sloping field has finished. A few lone grapes hang off the vines, which stretch up to wooded hills and down to a cherry orchard and the valley beyond, Motovun caught gold in the evening sun. As autumn takes hold, the leaves on the vines are turning to burnt yellow, rust and ruby.

‘I am here every day, so I don’t really notice how beautiful it is any longer,’ says Nikola, staring out over the hills. ‘But some days, I am here taking photos and, of course, the colours change all the time.’ He is a wine obsessive, naming his young son Salvatore after the vineyard, and spending his holidays visiting the world’s wine-producing regions. ‘You start to drink wine, and then the interest grows and grows,’ he says, climbing into his Land Cruiser to take us back to the winery, a mile or so up the road. ‘Suddenly you find you are addicted to wine-growing.’

He and his brother Albert have run Benvenuti wines since 2003, taking over from their father Livio. They use seven grape varieties, four of them local to Istria. At their farmhouse, trays of grapes are taken from the back of tractors and poured into presses, then stored in steel tankers and oak barrels. On one side of the cellar door, the branches of a mandarin tree are heavy with fruit and, on the other, a pile of logs is neatly stacked, ready for winter; the land sits poised between seasons. 

At the door to the tasting room, Suzana Korlević, who has worked here since finishing her oenology degree, brings glass after glass of wine to try with plates of local cheese and meat. We move from a fresh, appley white malvazija, introduced by the Venetians using vines from Greece, to a smoky red teran and a sweet muškat. A cat circles, beady eye on the salami, and is eventually banished indoors. ‘I know how hard it is to make something really good,’ says Suzana as she uncorks a final bottle, a mineral-rich rosé. ‘In the beginning you need land, and then you need money. But what you really need is passion – and we have plenty of that here.’

in the fields

A Boškarin cow is nibbling on my elbow. The fact that she is around at all to nibble is something of a miracle. The Istrian breed had all but died out before AZRRI – the local Agency for Rural Development – stepped in to save it. 

‘Traditionally, cattle were working animals,’ centre director Edmondo Šuran tells me as I extract my arm from the cow’s mouth. ‘They were replaced by machines during the agrarian revolution so there was no reason to keep them anymore.’ Tasked with reintroducing the native species, along with old-breed goats, sheep and donkeys unique to Istria, the agency worked to find economic reasons for farmers to keep the cattle, figuring they couldn’t keep them if no money could be made from them, however strong the emotional tie to the animals. ‘What is the only way to protect Istrian cattle?’ asks Edmondo with a wry smile. ‘It’s by putting it on the plate.’

At their headquarters, a set of farm buildings abandoned during WWII, the region’s best chefs come to learn about the meat and how to use it, gathering round bubbling pots and flinging open oven doors, releasing aromas that induce instant hunger pangs. Few will miss the irony of eating an animal in order to save it, but this is an undoubted success story – from a number barely hitting 100 in the 1990s, there are now 2,000 Boškarin cattle in Istria. 

Fifty-six of them are found on a farm a half-hour drive from the centre. It sits among softly rolling hills, each swathed in an apple orchard or a vineyard. Suzana Kučić and daughter Milica greet me at their farmhouse, chickens darting round their feet. We set out into the fields and Milica strides ahead, clapping and hollering. A flurry of cows soon appears, trotting through an open gate and appearing from behind bushes and fields in a merry hubbub of moos and grunts. Their formidable appearance – big-faced, jowly-necked, pointy-horned – belies the general softness of their character, and we are soon surrounded by animals demanding a scratch or stroke by way of a gentle but insistent nudge to the ribs.

‘They are like family,’ says Suzana, rubbing the head of a particularly large beast. ‘We know each of them by name.’ (It’s not a sentiment to make eating the meat an entirely comfortable experience when I try it later at a nearby tavern, but I can confirm that Boškarin steak is delicious. And Istrian donkey sausage – surprisingly delicious.)‘

Years ago we had few cows and only in the stable, and people moving away from the countryside,’ says Edmondo as we watch the cows hoovering up grass, the sun setting over the gently beguiling hills behind them. ‘Now we have cattle in the fields and young families out on the land making a living. This really is the Istrian ideal.’