Washington, DC | Wine Bar | Wine Club Subscription

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Key Results

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• Three membership tiers built around Maxwell Park's monthly wine theme
• Stronger buying power, with Table22's recurring, predictable member base letting Brent commit to full allocations and larger case orders at better pricing
• Deeper guest relationships, from members archiving notes and building cellars to trip recommendations traded from the road

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The playground philosophy

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Brent Kroll named Maxwell Park after a jungle gym by the railroad tracks in his native Detroit, the place he always wanted to go as a kid. He wanted to recreate those feelings when he opened the wine bar in DC's Shaw neighborhood in 2017: a room serious about wine without taking itself too seriously, where the staff pours in T-shirts instead of suits and the wine list gets scrawled on a chalkboard instead of laminated.

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Kroll earned his sommelier certification at 21, after a supervisor at his first restaurant job told him the only way into the high-earning sections was to actually know the wine. He's been in service for 25 years since, running beverage programs at DC institutions before striking out with Maxwell Park, and today he also owns Pop, a sparkling wine bar, and co-owns the cocktail bar Troubled Bird.

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For Kroll, the job has never been about pushing bottles. “What we want to do is make their day better when they walk in the door,” he says. “I am extremely pro-dialogue.” That means reading how someone's feeling and asking questions before recommending anything, rather than expecting a guest to work through fifty wines by the glass on their own. With a list that size, Kroll sees his team less as order-takers and more as concierges, there to make the wine easy rather than intimidating.

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Fifty new wines a month

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Maxwell Park pours fifty wines by the glass, and roughly thirty of them rotate out each month around a theme. Sometimes it's geeky, built around a soil type or a wine region. Sometimes it's playful, like a Taylor Swift month or a lineup themed to a band. The rotation is what makes the bar feel alive to regulars, and it gave Kroll a well of curation and storytelling that most wine programs never build.

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The catch was that all of that monthly thinking, the tasting, the research, the notes Kroll wrote on each bottle, only reached the people who happened to be sitting at the bar that week. What’s more, with such an extensive list, Kroll wanted to give guests a way to take a deeper dive into a couple of the truly special bottles they might otherwise miss.

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Focusing on what matters

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Working with Table22, Kroll built the Maxwell Park Wine Club around the same monthly rhythm that already drove the bar. He and his team pull their favorites from that month's fifty, the bottles they're most excited to put in front of people, and members choose a Two-Pack, Four-Pack, or Six-Pack depending on how deep they want to go. A rare wine add-on gives members the option to chase something more limited when the right bottle turns up.

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The notes are the part Kroll cares about most. "We're not using AI or copy and paste from a winery website," he says. Every bottle comes with real, personal tasting notes that members can archive and revisit whenever they're ready to open it, not filler copy that could describe any bottle in the category.

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Table22 runs the parts of the business Kroll never wanted to run himself. "They do all the work that I don't want to do," he says. This includes everything from onboarding to fulfillment and delivery, complete with payment processing and fielding any customer feedback. With those tasks off his plate, Kroll spends his time on the part that's actually his craft: picking the wine and writing about it.

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"[Table22 does] all the work that I don't want to do. I don't want to deliver wine, think about how it gets to people, or run the transactions. So I can focus more on the creativity of the club."

— Brent Kroll, Owner & Sommelier, Maxwell Park

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The club changed how Kroll buys, too. Knowing exactly how many members are waiting each month gives him leverage he didn't have selling by the glass alone. When eight cases of a specific wine land in the DC market, he can take the entire allocation and route it straight into the club. When he can commit to thirty cases instead of a handful, he gets a better price and turns that into a better deal for members.

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Cellars, postcards, and see-you-next-months

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The part of the club that's surprised Kroll most is how deeply it’s extended his relationships with guests. Members write in from the road asking what to drink or where to eat when they're traveling, trusting the taste and rapport they’ve built with Maxwell Park over any google search. Others have started genuinely building cellars around the club's themes, holding onto bottles from six months back until the right dinner party or occasion comes along to open them.

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Pickup day has become its own small ritual. Members collecting their club wine often stay for a glass and a conversation rather than grabbing their bag and heading out, turning what could be a quick handoff into an actual experience. Kroll sees the club as an extension of the pro-dialogue hospitality he built the bar on, layered on top of the wine itself.

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Lifestyle, not logistics

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Kroll's advice to other operators thinking about a club is to make it personal enough that people want it attached to their lifestyle, not just their wine rack. 

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"There's a lot of people selling food. There's a lot of people selling wine. Think about why someone would want to affiliate your club with their lifestyle."

— Brent Kroll, Owner & Sommelier, Maxwell Park

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Partnering with Table22 to run the club frees up valuable time for Kroll to focus on that philosophy, so that wine remains his lifestyle, not logistics.

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Our platform, your playground. Welcome to the Club.

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