As planning for this year's event kicked off so did social distancing restrictions for COVID-19, and while restrictions have eased in the months that have followed, the festival - like the rest of the country - is still having to take it on a day-by-day, week-by-week basis.

"There are still truffle hunts and truffle lunches at my venues and a few other venues but the spacing requirements are a little determined by what's going on with COVID," says Robinson, who is also a truffle farmer at Turalla Truffles.

"Each week I'm getting a lot of phone calls from people who are basically trying to make me break the rules, which I can't do. I can understand but it's complicated. It is what it is and we're working with it.

"Some people aren't doing hunts because of the issues around health. There are some older growers who aren't in the best of health and they're worried about the impact of COVID on their property. It's one of those things that is up to each person to decide how much risk they want to take."

It's not all bad news, however. The restrictions meant the festival had to embrace the online world to help boost the festival programming. The beginning of the festival saw Christophe Gregoire from Les Tres Bon in Bungendore do a virtual cooking demonstration for snow eggs. The festival is also set to see two more live stream demonstrations including on from Ben Willis of Aubergine.

"Realistically, if we had known COVID was coming earlier we would have been more prepared for online but it has shown us how easy it is to do online events," Robinson says.

"The beauty of an online event is that you can do a live stream and you get that benefit of the live element where people can ask questions, but then they can just sit there and people can watch it over and over again.

"We're a little hampered by the amount of time that we can spend as things change, adjusting what we are doing. In the years to come, I would say that it will become more and more online."

This year's truffle season has seen an increase of people purchasing truffles to cook with at home, and for those who are first-time truffle cooks, it's a great season to start trying your hand at cooking with the produce.

Wayne Haslam of Blue Frog Truffles, and one of the men behind the first Canberra Truffle Festival in 2009, says the season is turning out to be a good one.

"It's a bit of a turn-up, given the terrible drought that we had last year up until Christmas, and the very hot weather," he says.

"But we were blessed with great rainfall in the early part of this year which brought the truffles back. To go from irrigating up until Christmas, in the new year we were just laughing with the beautiful weather and the nice lead up with a very mild autumn and a cool winter so far. There have been several frosts, of course, so ripening beautifully."

Haslam says it's the capital's climatic conditions, which closely matches the natural growing areas in Europe, which puts Canberra on the map for truffles.

Truffles occur naturally in Spain, France, Italy, and Croatia, where it's a typical Mediterranean climate with hot dry summers and cold winters, and Canberra climate is a near-perfect match.

Australia as a whole started harvesting truffles in the late 1980s, and in the past 20 years, in particular, the country has become the fourth biggest producer of black winter truffles in the world.

"The interesting thing about truffles is the reason they have the exotic aroma is that the only way it can naturally propagate is to have animals dig them up and eat them, and spread their spores through the forest, through their droppings," Haslam says.

"We're cultivating them here, of course, so we don't have to worry too much about that. Interestingly, they've evolved this aroma to help with their propagation.

"And there has never been a recorded allergy to truffle. So even people who are allergic to mushrooms are not affected by truffle."

The Truffle Festival runs until the end of September. For more information go to trufflefestival.com.au.