A small chain of upscale New Jersey wine shops is preparing to close a location in Central Jersey and open two new locations in North Jersey.
CoolVines will be opening in the near future inside the Hahne and Company Building in Downtown Newark, located at 609 Broad Street. The business, which describes itself as offering “wine, beer, and spirits for the modern drinker,” currently has locations in Downtown Princeton as well as Downtown Jersey City, and is distributing flyers in its existing stores advertising the upcoming location in New Jersey’s largest city.
According to a legal notice, Newark Wines, LLC, which is trading as CoolVines Newark, applied late last year to the Newark Alcoholic Beverage Control Board in order to acquire the liquor license owned by Cooper’s Liquors & Deli on Orange Street, an institution in the city’s Roseville neighborhood.
Once the CoolVines location opens in the Hahne and Company Building, it will be the mixed-use development’s first liquor store. Housed in a former department store that had been vacant for decades, the Hahne’s property also includes apartments, a Whole Foods Market, Petco, Kite+Key, City National Bank, Rutgers University-Newark’s Express Newark facility, and more.
Jersey Digs reached out to CoolVines to find out exactly when the Newark store will be opening and this article will be updated should we hear back.
Meanwhile, the CoolVines in Princeton will be closing its doors later this month after nearly a decade in business in the Mercer County community. The company’s Founder and CEO Mark Censits wrote in a letter to the Princeton Packet that “we connected well with the market of young urban millennials who enjoy our fresh approach to wine selection and merchandising,” adding that “with that success, we have found ourselves in the enviable position of being sought out by other developers who see a “fine wine shop” as a marker of progress in building new neighborhoods.”
Censits explained that his decision to close the CoolVines in Princeton was based in part on the traffic to his store being reliant for the most part on local residents, while the shops in the municipality that are the best performing right now are geared towards tourists. He also mentioned that while the Princeton store closes and the Newark store opens, plans for a second location in Jersey City are underway.
There also used to be a CoolVines in the suburban Union County town of Westfield, but it was sold over two years ago and became NosVino.
