Looks like it's turning out to be a good truffle season in Australia. Tim Terry has announced his first shipment of truffles to France, and Perigord Truffles Of Tasmania (PTT) are about to ship to Japan. Meanwhile, a New South Wales grower tells me that she's harvesting a kilo a week from five year old trees.
Tim's waxing lyrical about his harvest. In an item on the ABC's The World Today he says:
"It's the beginning of a coming of age, if you like. We've gone from producing a truffle, now to producing enough to put a small trial shipment into Europe, and now what we want to do is get some more feedback from them, saying we want 500 kilos a week. And that's the sort of feedback that we are getting. They want a lot of truffles and we can't supply them at the moment."
He's clearly a happy man:
"Here we are in the foot of the Great Western Tiers, there's a bit of snow on top of the mountains today, Spring, the birds are happening, truffles coming out of the ground. It's just a magnificent place and great to be alive, isn't it?"
As they say down here, good on ya, mate. Transcript here. Podcast available, but you may have to dig in the archive (originally broadcast August 3rd).