"2 1/2 stars This is a really tough review to write. Until recently, I had such a positive opinion of Alba. I grew up a mile or two away from it and have a lot of pleasant memories of coming here when it was smaller and utilized the cute little gazebo and stone walled tasting room closer to the street. It's a place I have recommended countless times to people as a selling point of an area of NJ that often gets overlooked and/or isn't known at all. But over the past few years, the quality and customer service have diminished, and the prices have shot up dramatically by definition, you're getting less and paying more. I genuinely hope that the owners see the light and remember what made this winery so great. I'll start with the positives. The location is gorgeous; great landscape surrounding the area and it can be a lot of fun to hang out in the courtyard for a couple of hours and let your troubles melt away. The recently constructed tasting room doesn't have nearly the personality of the stone walled one, but the facilities are spacious and clean. I would say though that the tasting room isn't ideally organized/laid out. They want you to pay for drinks and cover at the counter immediately to your right. Unless you're familiar with the place, you're not going to see it right away, so the person behind the counter has to awkwardly hail you down and stop you from going further into the winery. The obvious fix there is to have the counter set up within eyeline so that doesn't happen. They also have very legit food items, which I've learned is not a given at a winery. There's a wood burning pizza establishment called Trattoria Di Fiore that continually operates just off the courtyard, and they make decent pies. I'm a big fan of the wine, but this is sort of a positive wrapped in a negative. They had an incredible gewurztraminer here a few years ago and inexplicably stopped bottling it by itself, opting to use it as part of their GTR and dessert blends. Huge mistake. They also stopped making the raspberry and blueberry wines, which were delicious. It's just mystifying and self defeating. I came here with three friends for Memorial Day. It wasn't crowded in the least, possibly because of the heat and possibly because people want to BBQ instead on this particular holiday. An older woman was manning the counter and just flat out isn't very pleasant. I've dealt with her before, so it's not an aberration. I'm assuming that she's part of the ownership or close to it, but it's odd to me that you'd have someone with that type of personality handling a customer service position, particularly the one that most visitors are going to see first. She was very terse and never smiled. When I gave her two dollar coins to help pay for my friend, she made a face and sighed. Last time I checked, dollar coins were legitimate legal tender, and it's such a bad look to alienate your paying customers like that, especially when you're asking them to pay for water (I really don't think wineries in general should be charging for water you're making a tidy profit on the wines, let people hydrate without breaking the bank). When we got to the courtyard, my other friend reported that the woman was really unpleasant to her as well. A real unforced error on Alba's part. Beyond the mediocre customer service, it's hard to completely enjoy yourself when you're getting constantly price gouged throughout the experience. It definitely wasn't this bad back in the day. For most if not all weekend visits, you're assessed at least a $10 cover, which they try to sell you on by also including it in a wine flight, which is around $22. If you're set on a particular wine though, it's not a good deal. On this particular visit, I ordered a glass of GTR, which was $9. As mentioned by other reviews, the individual glasses are super cheap/small plastic ones, and you're probably getting 75% of a dictionary definition glass of wine. So before I even set foot in the courtyard, I was down $19. It's a total rip off and you're better off just getting a bottle if you have the ability to. Later on, I went back for a bottle of dessert wine, Dolcina, which cost $20 (pretty standard for a bottle purchased directly from a winery, in my experience). The bottle is literally half the size of a normal one, and doesn't taste great the initial taste is of fermented apples, which then gets a little sweeter/better. The absence of the larger bottles of raspberry and blueberry wine loomed large. At the very least, they should let you know on the wine menu that it's a smaller sample. The intangibles are here the location and most of the wines are really good. If they stopped trying to maximize the price point on every single aspect of the winery experience, they'd actually be a decent recommendation again."
