PARIS — Just about everything in Eduardo Manzanares's shop, Truffes Folies, is made with truffles. Sausage, cheese, spaghetti — even popcorn.
But during the year-end holidays, the main order of business is fresh truffles, especially the black or Périgord truffle, Tuber melanosporum. The prized mushrooms are used to stuff Christmas turkeys, chickens or capons, Mr. Manzanares said, making Dec. 24 typically the biggest truffle-eating night of the year in France.
But it is also becoming an increasingly expensive tradition. Black truffles and other types of truffles are becoming scarcer, and some scientists say it is because of the effects of global climate change on the fungus's Mediterranean habitat. One wholesaler says prices have risen tenfold over the last dozen years.
At Truffes Folies, in the chic Seventh Arrondissement of Paris, black truffles are selling for the equivalent of about 2,000 euros a kilogram, or more than $1,200 a pound — living up to their traditional nickname, "black diamonds."
Of course, few people buy black truffles by the pound. Still, even a single black truffle big enough for bits to be slipped under the skin of a turkey, the rest added to the stuffing, can easily cost 100 euros.
"This hasn't been a great year for truffles," Mr. Manzanares said in his shop, which includes a small restaurant. He said some customers had switched to lesser varieties like the summer truffle, Tuber aestivum, also known as the Burgundy truffle, which sells for about 400 euros a kilogram when in season. The current substitute is more likely to be the winter truffle, Tuber brumale, which sells for about 900 euros a kilogram.
Like fine wine, truffles are a global luxury with an appeal to the wealthy that keeps prices high even with Europe in recession. Stanley Ho, the Macau billionaire, paid $330,000 at a charity auction in 2010 for nearly 1.3 kilograms of Italian white truffles, a variety more treasured than even the black truffle.
There are various reasons for what has been a decline over decades in the harvest of black truffles from southern France, Spain and Italy, including shrinking forests and changes in land use. In France alone, the annual black truffle harvest has fallen from about 1,000 tons in the 1930s to about 50 tons now.
The painstaking nature of truffle gathering also adds to the cost. Despite gradual improvement in cultivation techniques, the subterranean fungi are still sniffed out by trained dogs and then carefully dug by hand from the tangle of tree roots in which they grow.
But now, a team of scientists writing in the British journal Nature says that part of that decline appears to be linked to climate change. They found that the French and Spanish black truffle harvest correlated closely with summer rains, and that the truffle habitat had suffered over the last few decades from hotter summers and less precipitation. That trend is expected to continue, according to most climate models.
The scientists said that the exact reasons hotter, drier summers should reduce yields was unknown, but it may be that the fungus and its host trees, mostly oaks and hazelnuts, end up competing for water when rainfall is scarce. "If we know the reason, maybe we can adapt and compensate," said Ulf Büntgen, the paleoclimatologist who led the study.
Scientists will be watching to see whether the truffle harvest will continue its steep decline if — as climate forecasts hold — Mediterranean basin summers keep getting hotter and drier.
While Mr. Büntgen's team predicted a continued drop in the Mediterranean truffle yield, they held out the possibility that other, more northerly regions might become increasingly hospitable growing areas, in the same adaptive phenomenon that has led some French Champagne producers to start looking north to England as a possible future site for vineyards.
Mr. Büntgen said the summer truffle was already being found north of the Alps more frequently than in the past.
The researchers noted that Italy's black truffle yields had not shown a climate-related falloff, which they speculated was because the habitat of Tuber melanosporum there has traditionally received twice the rainfall of other places it grows and thus has a built-in buffer against the effects of changing climate.
To be conclusive about any of this, though, Mr. Büntgen said much more research would be necessary to have better data about cultivation and harvests. "The mushroom people in general, and the truffle people in particular, are not good about sharing information," he said, a tendency complicated by what he called a huge black market in truffles.
The truffle market is indeed notoriously opaque, with just one family-owned company, Urbani Tartufi, based in Spoleto, Italy, controlling about three-quarters of the truffle trade.
Olga Urbani, a company spokeswoman, said the price Urbani charged its customers, which included restaurants and hotels, had risen from about 150 euros a kilogram for black truffles 12 years ago to about 1,500 euros a kilogram now, as the harvest declined by about two-thirds. The trends are similar for the Italian white truffle and the summer truffle, she said.
Forecasting a future of fewer truffles, Ms. Urbani said, the company set a strategy about decade ago to diversify from a "pure truffle" business toward what she called the "democratization" of the fungus by making relatively inexpensive truffle products — sauces and the like — for a broader clientele.
Back in his shop, which was redolent with the earthy aroma of mushrooms, Mr. Manzanares reflected on his decades in the truffle business.
"Twenty years ago, people bought a lot more because it wasn't nearly so expensive," he said. "Today it really is a luxury product."
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