By Daniela Deane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 5, 2006

Can one restaurant meal lead you to everything you need to know about a place?

In Italy's misty, mountainous Piedmont region, where the 2006 Winter Olympics begin this Friday, the answer is a resounding yes.

And I'm not talking about some fancy Michelin-starred establishment that every guidebook tells you to visit. Just dinner at a simple place, an osteria down the street from where you're staying.

And that's without getting what I wanted to eat. Because I was after something pretty specific.

One of my main reasons for visiting Alba, a town of medieval red-brick towers about 30 miles southeast of the Olympic host city of Torino (please, let's call it that instead of the Anglicized Turin), was to try to sample the region's famed white truffles.

Alba is Italy's truffle capital. It's also the heart of a major Italian wine-producing area, where Barolo, Barbaresco, Asti Spumante, Cinzano and Martini and Rossi (just to name a few wines) are made.

It's the center of Italian chocolate country too, as the headquarters of the multinational Ferrero company, which produces Ferrero Rochers and Nutella. And it's the heart of the magical Langhe area, a classic Italian landscape of grape-covered hills, medieval towns and dramatic castles.

Alba and nearby Torino are in northwestern Italy, near the Alps and the border with France, in the foggy, land-locked Piedmont, which in Italian means "foot of the mountains."

But back to the truffles.

I had never eaten the succulent, super-pricey delicacies -- and that was a big, embarrassing gap in my Italian identity. I was born in Italy and my mother grew up in Torino. What kind of daughter of a Piedmontese has never tasted ta rtufi bianchi shaved on pasta?

I was determined to right this culinary wrong in Alba rather than at some fancy Italian restaurant in Washington. I knew, of course, that the height of truffle season -- usually September through December -- was over. But I had heard that last year, truffles were eaten in this gastronomic wonderland late into January. And January was the only time I had.

So I, and a colleague traveling with me, went on a truffle hunt. Not with the sniffing dogs, mind you -- it was really too late for that -- but truffle restaurant-hopping.

The manager of our hotel suggested some places we could try. He warned us not to order black truffles, which he said were as common as potatoes.

We wandered through the cobblestone streets of the medieval part of Alba -- it also has a bustling modern section, since it's quite a prosperous little city -- looking at the restaurant menus posted outside. Not a white truffle in sight. We saw one black truffle dish, but I wasn't falling for that.

When we got to the last of the manager's suggestions, Osteria Lalibera, with still no white truffles on view, I decided to just go in and find out.

You would think I had asked owner Flavia Boffa if I could buy her first-born.

" Tartufi bianchi ? Now?" she asked incredulously. Even though we were both speaking in Italian, she eyed me suspiciously.

"Well, I was hoping, maybe," I stammered. "I saw them in some of the shops in town."

She snorted. "Those aren't Albese truffles. Those are Tuscan truffles. Unscrupulous people are trying to pass those off as the real thing."

She pulled out a thick book all about truffles and explained what the problem was. The precious white subterranean funghi are 75 percent water, she said, pointing to a big chart on the composition of truffles. And a cold snap right after Christmas froze them right where they were under the Albese ground, the only place a true white truffle grows.

Diners were waiting to pay their bills. I hadn't said we were going to eat there. In fact, I had given the opposite impression -- that I hadn't given up on finding a place that could satisfy my desire. But she didn't seem to care.

First Alba lesson: They take this truffle thing seriously.

Boffa was able to convince me that I wasn't going to be able to eat real Alba truffles. And I thought it might kill her if I accidentally downed one of those Tuscan fakes.

She had spent 15 minutes with me already, and her restaurant was packed. So we decided to stay.

She led us to one of the tables, which were placed closed together. The restaurant was just two rooms, softly lit, with half a dozen small tables in each room. On the crisp white tablecloth was something I had never seen in Italy before.

Long, hollow, flaky breadsticks -- almost three feet long apiece -- had been placed on the table along with several pieces of bread. No bread basket, no plastic wrappers, just right there on the tablecloth, arranged just so. It looked like a still-life painting.

Second lesson: This part of Italy is really classy -- and quite original.

Boffa handed us the one-page menu and the 22-page wine list. Barolos and Barbarescos, the mighty red wines of the Piedmont, were listed on separate pages by the year. (Barolos, the most famous wines of the area, enjoyed an unprecedented run of great vintages from 1996 to 2001.) Barbarescos from the nearby renowned Gaja winery came with price tags of up to $267 a bottle.

We began studying the list. She quickly returned.

"We'd like a nice bottle of red, but we can't spend a fortune," I said. She made some suggestions and then scurried off, we thought to let us contemplate what she had told us.

But no. She was soon back with two big wineglasses and an open bottle of 1998 Barolo from the Mauro Molino winery in the nearby hilltop town of La Morra, which also has a castle. At $46, it was one of the cheapest Barolos on her list.

"I think you'll like this," she said, pouring us each a taste, without asking permission.

Lesson three: They really know their wines around here, and they're completely confident you'll like them. (And you do. Because they're really good.)

Piedmontese cuisine can be heavy, elaborate and almost French-like -- cream and butter play leading roles, and hearty risottos are common. I ordered vitello tonnato -- thin slices of veal carpaccio served with a light green mayonnaise sauce -- followed by fried lamb cutlets with fried calf's brains and artichokes. Sounds heavy, but the batter was light and heavenly, and the amount of food was just right. My friend opted for a warming chickpea soup and a fabulous cheese plate.

As we were waiting for our food, and contentedly sniffing, swirling and sipping our noble Barolo, I told Boffa I was upset that many of the wineries of the Langhe seemed to be closed in January. All that we'd seen in the snow-covered vineyards was the odd worker pruning naked grape plants.

As we'd driven through the charming area, we could only make out the towns and castles when they were right in front of us, because of snow and fog. That day it had snowed more than half a foot, even closing Milan's airport.

This isn't the time to visit the Langhe -- the Piedmontese say spring and fall are both beautiful -- but I didn't have any choice. My visit was timed to coincide with the buildup to the Olympic Games. Not only had I missed the truffles, now I was going to miss the wineries too, I told Boffa, despairing.

I also had wanted to visit the castle in Barolo, a hilltop town near Alba that bears the same name as the wine. The castle, one of about a dozen within a half-hour drive of Alba, houses an enoteca, a center for buying Piedmontese wines. I could just imagine the rich bottles of wine lined inside a medieval room in Barolo's castle. But it's closed in January, too.

Boffa had a solution.

She pointed to a distinguished gentleman at the table next to us. "He's a big wine producer in this area," she mouthed, sotto voce. "Vaira wineries."

Since our tables were close (Boffa told us she does that on purpose to encourage conversation), we were soon chatting with Aldo Vaira and his son Beppe, whose winery outside Barolo produces about 150,000 bottles of mostly red, but also some white, wine a year -- wine that is sold in several restaurants and stores in the District, Maryland and Virginia.

He invited us to visit his winery the next day, which we did. Twenty-year-old Beppe, fluent in three languages as well as the language of wine, stayed with us for hours, taking us from the family's vineyards to their ornate cellars to show us how the wine is made and preserved. We saw the cellar's dramatic stained-glass windows by an Italian artist.

We tasted many of the Vaira wines that afternoon (spitting most of them out, I promise) while listening to young Beppe speak passionately about his family's love of winemaking. He had us mesmerized.

But back to the night before.

After Vaira and Beppe left the restaurant, an Italian thirtysomething couple at the table on our other side started talking to us, too. They were teachers in Torino and had driven 40 minutes to Alba just to eat dinner at Boffa's simple, understated restaurant. And even though they were thin and beautiful in that Italian way, they tucked into three courses and dessert (it's all about portion size). Plus a nice bottle of red wine, of course.

As we were paying our check up front -- it felt like a good deal at just over $50 each -- we started talking to another gentleman who was also paying his bill. He was a hotshot at the sprawling Ferrero chocolate factory in town, and he invited us to come see how they make Nutella.

Final Alba lesson: Everything starts with dinner. And you don't need to eat truffles to have a magical night.

Daniela Deane will be online Monday at 2 p.m. to answer questions about this story during the Travel section's regular weekly chat on www.washingtonpost.com. To read more about Deane's trip through the Piedmont, see her blog, Torino Travels, at www.washingtonpost.com/travel.