Truffles, Wine and the Rise of the Willamette Valley as the Foodie Paradise

America's greatest concentration of food delicacies is found in the Willamette Valley

With each passing month and year that I live in this place, it is becoming clearer and clearer that I live in the promised land for artisan foods.

Query the wisdom of Google or even its upstart competitor ChatGPT about the best place in the U.S. for fine wine and it reveals that “Willamette Valley” is among the top locations. Ask about artisan cheese production: Willamette Valley pops up in the top five. Ask about the best location for edible mushrooms. Willamette Valley. Do the same for craft beer and ciders and you get the Willamette Valley near the top of the list.

But ask about truffles, and the learned oracles of the communication age all point to one place: the Willamette Valley. Even my own investigation of the best truffle sources reveals that the Willamette Valley ranks among the top five places not only in the United States but rather on the globe for the concentration and harvesting of these delicate morsels of umami goodness.

Setting aside for the moment that the Willamette Valley may be the pre-eminent locale for great artisan foods and ingredients in the U.S., it is the Oregon truffle to which I want to draw your attention. Mine was drawn to these little orbs of yum when I stood in the cellar of Jim Bernau’s Willamette Valley Vineyards last Saturday to watch a parade of dogs and their shaggy owners celebrated for their truffle hunting prowess.

The occasion was the intimate awards ceremony for the 2025 Joriad North American Truffle Dog Competition. Earlier that day a host of amateur truffle hunters and their dogs were put through the paces of sniffing out truffles in boxes, strategically buried in dirt and out in the damp reaches of a Willamette Valley Douglas Fir stand. The competition is for amateur truffle-hunting teams. That is to say, these folks and partner pooches do not professionally gather and sell truffles. They simply delight in training together to detect the elusive truffle and gathering them for their own use.

The winning pooch, Rosie, located 76 truffles in the wild…in a single hour. This is nearly unheard of for the now 8-year-old competition. Another way of putting this, which was expressed by nearly every seasoned truffle hunter I talked to on Saturday, is that 2025 may be the best year for Oregon truffles in memory. The feat of detecting 76 truffles in a single hour shocked even the truffle professionals in the audience at the Willamette Valley Vineyard’s cellar. They had a difficult time expressing just how unusual this abundance was.