About Candice Hjärta
Candice Hjärta is a wine writer, amateur winemaker, and recovering Franzia survivor based in Portland, Oregon. She loves new food, wine, and travel adventures, both close to home and far away—always on the hunt for her next favorite wine bar, Pacific Northwest road trip, or excuse to board a plane.
As a teenager growing up in Kailua, Hawaii, Candice's introduction to wine was like most 90s kids'—a stolen space bag from a box of her mom's Franzia White Zinfandel, smuggled out of the house under her jacket. She never drank it again and only remembers what it tasted like coming back up. Undeterred, she expanded her palate: Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill, Mad Dog 20/20, 40s of Mickey's Ice nursed all night through two straws twisted into one long straw, whatever hard liquor was available poured into a half-finished 7-Eleven soda, swigs from a bottle of Alizé this one guy always stole from the grocery store, and red cups of swipes—a bootleg fruit wine some other guy's brother had learned to make in prison. Candice decided she didn't like wine.
Her 20s brought better taste in wine, mostly because she developed a genuine obsession with cooking and started throwing dinner parties. Pairing meals with wine led to opinions, and opinions led to scowling at the notes of cough syrup in the $5 Yellow Tail Shiraz her friends kept bringing over. She began dating someone whose guiding philosophy was that money spent on a delicious meal was never wasted—a motto she found deeply compatible with her own—and through that relationship she got her first real taste of wine travel. A trip to Sonoma wine country cracked something open: the understanding that wine wasn't just a beverage but a place, a story, a whole world she hadn't known existed. That relationship didn't last. The next one was with someone who worked in fine dining, and he came with perks: fancy leftovers and half-finished bottles of wine from France and Italy arriving home with him at the end of a shift. Her palate kept climbing even when her love life was a little chaotic.
Meanwhile, in the late 90s, her parents had bought land in Southern Oregon and planted Freed Estate Vineyard—a decision that would eventually change everything. Candice moved to Portland, Oregon in 2006, then spent a couple of years living and working at Freed Estate before the pull of Portland brought her back—but not before the vineyard gave her something she's carried ever since.
It was her family's Syrah that she first fell completely, embarrassingly head-over-heels in love with. Maybe it was the pride in her father's voice when he talked about it. Maybe it was the memory of sitting in the gazebo after a long day swimming in the river—wrapped in a towel, plate of barbecued leg of lamb in hand, the smell of smoke and cooling evening air pulling everyone inside—sipping a glass of something that tasted like it belonged exactly there. Maybe it was the wine itself: restrained and elegant, ripe blackberry and black pepper, light vanilla, a whisper of fresh herbs and flowers. Probably it was all three. Candice's favorite red varietal to this day remains Syrah, in all its wildly different expressions around the world. (Not you, Yellow Tail Shiraz.) A part of her is always trying to find her way back to the feeling of that evening.
Candice's father died in 2022, and her grief was all-encompassing and confusing in ways she hadn't anticipated. It kept her from her family and from the vineyard for a long time. During that period, she grew closer to Steve—a longtime friend who, she gradually realized, had a particular gift for reminding her of the best, funniest parts of her dad. The unfinished projects scattered across his property. The insistence on pulling over to investigate any pile of free stuff on the side of the road. Slowly, without her quite noticing, the twinkle came back. She found herself celebrating who her dad was instead of only mourning what had been lost.
A few months later, she brought Steve to meet her family at the vineyard. While Steve was busy falling in love with the place, Candice was busy noticing something else: how perfectly suited he was to winemaking. The man had degrees in Chemistry, Mechanical Engineering, and an MBA. He'd been a luxury car mechanic. He'd homebrewed beer for years. When he mentioned he was thinking about planting vines on his property, Candice—knowing exactly how humbling viticulture can be—suggested he try making wine from her family's grapes first, before committing to anything with roots.
They bought their first winemaking equipment in July 2023, formed Química Wine Company, and applied for their winery permits and licenses at Steve's property in Washington. Things did not go smoothly—permits and licenses have a way of not cooperating with harvest schedules—so their first wines were made under a custom crush agreement with another winemaker. They harvested a ton of Tempranillo in late September and a ton of Syrah in late October. They also worked with some untended "wild" Merlot at Freed Estate to make a Pét-Nat. It was a full circle moment that she hadn't planned and couldn't have scripted: using grapes grown from vines her father had planted, making wine with a man her father would never meet but would have recognized immediately as one of the good ones. It was hard work. It felt like exactly the right place to be.
That first harvest made one thing immediately clear: she had a lot to learn. (Two words: smoke taint.) Not one to ever half-ass anything, Candice signed her whole ass up for the Winemaking program at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon, starting in January 2024. In the fall of 2024 she took the production class, helping harvest eleven different grape varietals and following each wine through from harvest all the way to bottling in June 2025. She currently holds a 4.0 GPA and is close to completing her Associate of Science in Winemaking—just a harvest internship and a capstone class to go.
Simultaneously—because apparently she doesn't believe in doing one thing at a time—she completed WSET Level 2 in January 2024 (passed with distinction) and WSET Level 3 in March 2024 (passed with merit), and has begun the WSET Level 4 Diploma. She daydreams sometimes about going on to get a Bachelor of Science in Enology and maybe even become a Master of Wine at some point.
Along the way, Candice discovered something unexpected: she loves writing about wine just as much as she loves drinking it. Maybe more, on the days the writing is going well. She never tires of reading about it, learning about it, or finding new ways to share it with other people—because above all, wine is an experience, and experiences are better shared.
Wine evokes memory in a way few things can. That first Franzia—she will never forget it, and not fondly. The gazebo, the Syrah, the barbecued lamb, the smell of the river—etched onto her heart permanently. The memories don't even have to involve wine itself. The first time she smelled a Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, she was seven years old again in Kailua: she and her best friend, soaking wet from the sprinklers on a hot afternoon, cutting a lilikoi in half to share on the warm cement. The wine hadn't even touched her lips yet.
That's what she wants to talk about. Not scores, not hierarchies, not the right way to hold a glass. She wants to give people a basic framework for tasting and then get out of the way while they bring everything they are to it—their memories, their preferences, their own wet-cement-and-passionfruit moments. Her stories, writing, and photos are here to educate, entertain, and nudge people toward finding their own relationship with wine. Even if that relationship currently involves Franzia White Zinfandel or Yellow Tail Shiraz. She has been there. She understands.
May your glass always be half full—preferably with something better than Franzia,
Candice Hjärta
P.S. The name Hjärta is a pen name that means “heart” in Swedish. The main purpose of having a pen name is so that Candice’s work in wine and her work in her side gig as a lawyer don’t get mixed up when clients are Googling her.
