A new wine store called WineWorks opened in Marlton NJ this summer. We walked in on a weekday morning last week and stood in front of their Enomatic wine tasting machine for about 10 minutes trying to figure it out. Despite being the only customers in the store, the friendly helpful knowledgeable employees who only work in privatized stores (and who turned out to be students on summer jobs waiting to go back to college) did not approach us and offer to help. Finally, we walked over to the register and asked someone how to use it.
The machine takes a card that you buy for $5. The card entitles you to 4 one ounce services of wine a day. The friendly helpful knowledgeable employee told us that they couldn't give us more than that because of the ABC (Division of Alcholic Beverage Control). (Turns out they regulate alcohol in NJ too!)
Despite being a super efficient privatized store, they were out of cards to sell us for the machine. Luckily, they had a card on hand that we could use just for that day. Just when we were about to taste, though, another friendly helpful knowledgeable employee came by and inexplicably took the spit bucket away so we had to walk over to a sink to spit out the wine (it was 11 am and we were driving).
We tasted a Chardonnay, a Rose from Tavel, a Pinot Noir and a Rioja. Despite the problems, we quickly fell in love with the Enomatic. It was great to be able to sample different wines without having to buy them. The friendly helpful knowledgeable employee told us the machine cost $50,000 and is the only one of its kind on the East Coast. Our only quibble is that the wines in the machine were too heavily from California for our taste, but we were assured the wines rotated.
Besides the machine, the store had some good wines at good prices. Some of the prices were better than the PLCB (Monte Antico $10.99 at WineWorks; $13.99 PLCB ) but there were also wines that the PLCB had for better prices (Joseph Drouhin St. Veran $17.99 at Wine Works, $11.99 at PLCB).
This store is really too far from Philly for a quick trip, but if you are out there we advise checking it out, if only for the Enomatic. There is also a Canals around the corner on Rt 73 and Canal's Bottlestop past the intersection on Rt 70 E. Be warned they are changing a traffic circle there so there is a lot of construction.
