Barbara and her Lagotto Romagnolo dogs are the chief truffle hunters at Macenmist. Photo: Supplied.
Macenmist Black Truffles, located just outside of Bredbo in the Snowy Monaro region of NSW, is on the market, giving a lucky buyer the rare opportunity to buy one of the region’s most established truffle farms, which comes attached to a highly successful agritourism business.
Buying the property in 1997 and planting their first oaks in 2008, Richard and Barbara Hill were ahead of the truffle trend, which didn’t see widespread adoption on Australian menus until 2010.
“WA & Tasmania were the first truffle-producing states in Australia but in this region, Canberra and the eastern states, we were on the forefront,” says Barbara.
Getting the truffiere off the ground presented some challenges, and when Richard and Barbara’s co-investor and neighbour died before the trees were even in the ground, they had to spend significant time researching to replace the information that was lost with his passing.
Despite the roadblocks, Richard and Barbara exceeded their own expectations as well as the industry standards when they defied all of the data they had and produced a few lone truffles in the first season.
“The very first year we were shocked and amazed that we got three truffles. According to everyone, we wouldn’t get truffles in under three years,” Barb says.
“We got three truffles off two trees, and we had been prepared to wait up to 10 years. I wasn’t ready for it; I didn’t even have the dogs yet.”
Richard and Barbara in action on their agritourism truffle experience. Photo: Supplied.
Over the years, Richard kept meticulous records of the yields from each tree, and as Barbara pulls out 28 years of handwritten rain records from the property, you get the sense that records were one of Richard’s fortes.
Richard sadly passed in 2023, but his legacy lives on not only in the trees he planted and the farm he built by hand but also in the records he kept, which have been essential to the business, tracking details like truffle yields from each tree, no small task given the 600 trees they started with and the hundreds more that have been planted since.
“It’s a symbiotic relationship; if you have a good year, the tree can extract the minerals from the ground, and it doesn’t need the truffle the following year. If it doesn’t need the minerals, it doesn’t host the truffles,” shares Barbara.
With Richard gone, Barbara and her two Lagotto Romagnolo dogs Song Lu and Tawdiffu are the heart of the truffle operation and together they ensure the smooth running of the agritourism that Barb has built up to leverage the action on a working truffle farm.
Although now clearly a natural at hosting tourists, tourism is a branch of the business that Barb stumbled into when she was asked to host the NSW Lagotto Association annual get-together.
It was the first time she had hosted a group at the farm, catering for large numbers of people who were camped on the property for two days. She says it was hard and something that she thought she would never do again, but over the years she hosted the same event three times and it became the catalyst to opening her doors to more visitors.
Large coach groups come every winter for the truffle hunt and lunch at Macenmist. Photo: Tenele Conway.
Those visitors are now active participants in the annual truffle hunt which runs from June each year and afterwards are treated to a three-course meal cooked by Barb herself. Barb always downplays the truffle lunch that takes place after the hunt, ever mindful that participants know that this is an experience on a working truffle farm, not a Michelin meal.
No matter what Barb thinks of the lunch, it’s an experience that is only growing in popularity as Barb makes more and more connections with tour operators, particularly in Asia, and watching the dogs at work, sniffing through the truffle forest and alerting Barb when they have found truffles, you’re witnessing a relationship which is as symbiotic as the relationship between the trees and their need of nutrients from the truffles.
The demand is so high she has had to expand her facilities more than once and can now accommodate 80 people for a seated lunch, which is more than double the capacity that they started with.
Participants in a truffle hunt get up close and personal with the product. Photo: Tenele Conway.
Barb gets a kick out of the varied audience the truffle business attracts and is most animated when telling stories of the chefs from Parliament House digging their own truffles or the time a Chinese couple rolled down the rutted country road to the property in a Rolls Royce ready to spend big on the highly valued Black Perigord Truffle that Barb grows and sells.
Despite the property being on the market, Barb is in no rush to move on. She knows that such a unique proposition will require patience for the right buyer.
“Bear in mind I’m over 70; I’m happy here for now, but I don’t want to be here when I’m 90,” Barb jokes in her always direct and frank manner.
While she patiently waits for the right buyer, another truffle season has kicked off, and Barb’s books are mostly full, as each weekend a new group joins her, Song Lu and Tawdiffu on the hunt for the season’s treasures that are buried beneath the soil that she and Richard spent half a lifetime cultivating.
Macenmist is located at 230 Cappanana Road, Bredbo. For more information on the sale head, check out the listing on Zango.
