AYE Creator
Nicole Heere is in her garage, hand-painting resin wine flight trays while her daughter is at school. Shaped like oversized artist palettes, each tray is punctuated with holes precisely sized to hold small wine glasses — a clever little marriage of art and utility. It is the only uninterrupted time she has to work through the many details involved in transforming a 19th-century house just a couple of blocks away from Grapevine’s Main Street into something part tasting room, part gallery, and entirely her own.
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The trays are a fitting introduction to Housewife Rebellion, a brand built on making familiar objects do something unexpected.
Nicole’s bottles feature pop-art portraits of mid-century women wielding household items like cheese graters, hairbrushes and cocktail glasses with a defiant wink. The imagery is vintage. The attitude is not.
The tasting room was originally supposed to open last September. Then Christmas. Then February. Historic properties, construction timelines and lease negotiations, she has learned, rarely operate on the same schedule. But inside the space that finally opens on Grapevine’s Worth Street in early September, the extra time shows.
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The result is anything but generic. Pink walls catch the light with a subtle glittery sheen. Pink bows trim the curtains. And in a touch that feels especially on-brand, Nicole’s 9-year-old daughter, Mina, has created a pink glitter lemonade, served in cups printed with her own signature logo. Like the bottles themselves, the room is feminine, witty and fully committed to the bit.
A Recession, a Cart, and a Reinvention
Nicole’s path to artist and winemaker began in a far less romantic setting: corporate real estate. She spent a decade in the field before the recession upended that version of her life.
“I thought to myself, well, I can’t make money doing a job I’m supposed to like,” she says. “I’ll try doing a job I like, but I’m not supposed to be making money at. Artist life.”
That decision eventually led her to New Orleans, where she moved into a 200-square-foot apartment near Jackson Square and worked as a street artist in the French Quarter. Each day, she wheeled out her cart, painted in public and talked with the tourists who stopped to watch.
She and her now-husband had only planned to pass through on the way to Florida. Instead, she saw possibility everywhere and stayed.
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It remains one of her favorite chapters, and one that shaped the way she thinks about art, commerce and place. In New Orleans, she says, artists are woven into the life of the city rather than treated as an afterthought.
Eventually, life brought her back to Texas. There was an engagement, a marriage and stops in Austin, Charleston and Columbia, where she opened a small gallery. But with family in the Dallas area, and the chance for her daughter to grow up near a cousin just six months apart, proximity began to matter more than bohemia.
She came home.
A Label Looking for a Bottle
Nicole is quick to point out that she is relatively new to wine.
“During COVID, I started drinking wine — like a normal person,” she says with a laugh.
But as someone immersed in contemporary art, she noticed an opening. The art world, she says, is still heavily driven by male consumers and collectors. Wine consumers, by contrast, skew female.
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“I thought, well, let me try what I’m doing and see if I can do it with wine coming out of COVID,” she says.
In 2022, she designed labels featuring her artwork and placed them on wine bottles as part of an art show display. At the time, the bottles were simply props. She could not even open them. But people responded immediately. On the final day of the show, a high-end artist she admired pulled her aside.
“He said, ‘Whatever you do moving forward, keep the wine,’” she recalls.
Then came the viral moment. Someone with millions of followers shared her work, and Nicole’s phone lit up with notifications. Soon after, a major German publication featured it. At the time, she was home with a newborn, staring at her screen in disbelief.
The pieces that took off reflected the sharp humor that has since become her signature: superheroes doing housework, Catwoman vacuuming, Spider-Man folding laundry, Storm Troopers in yoga poses. The point was the reversal. Familiar figures were placed in unexpectedly domestic roles, stripped of their usual mythology and recast with irony.
Learning the Wine World, One Question at a Time
Nicole approached wine the same way she approaches most things: by asking questions. She talked with everyone she could, from winemakers to the men driving the trucks, wanting to understand not just the romance of the industry but the mechanics behind it.
There were early rejections from wineries she admired. Some never replied at all. Eventually, she found the right winemakers — people who understood the concept from the start.
“I feel like they’re partners,” she says. “They know what they’re doing.”
Her wines are produced in the Texas Hill Country, and her Pinot Grigio is her most awarded. “I like to drink it by the pool,” she says. Her rosé has also earned major accolades.
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There is family history behind the business, too. Nicole’s family is from Fredericksburg, and during Prohibition, they owned the only pharmacy in the tri-county area.
“My family had access to materials during Prohibition that nobody else did, and they exploited some loopholes,” she says, laughing. “We kept the Hill Country wet with the good stuff.”
That legacy stayed with her. As she looked at what Fredericksburg has become — and at the buildings her family once owned on Main Street before selling them decades ago — she found herself thinking about what had been lost and what might still be reclaimed.
Today, her father and uncle live in the neighborhood, about a mile from the crush facilities, and her uncle has even helped bottle the wine. What started as a creative business idea now feels, in part, like a return.
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A Rebellion Needs a Roof
Nicole had a clear vision for the tasting room from the beginning. It had to be in a historic home, and it had to be in a walkable area.
“That’s very difficult,” she says. “I mean, it’s stressful. It’s impossible to find.”
With a decade of real estate experience behind her, she knew how to search. There were near-misses: a McKinney property that fell apart over bathroom logistics, another historic home that sold to a developer and one Grapevine location that was not quite right.
Then, a few hours after learning that first Grapevine space would not work, she found the house.
Built in the 1800s and located just across from Esparza’s, it checked every box. It also gave her room to think bigger. The delays were frustrating, but they also gave her time to keep creating.
“Because it keeps getting delayed, I keep making more,” she says.
Pretty With a Purpose
Designing the tasting room brought accessibility into sharper focus. Nicole’s mother had cancer and used a wheelchair, so she has seen how often public spaces meet the minimum requirements without offering much dignity or delight. She wanted more than compliance. She wanted beauty.
One bathroom is dedicated to Frida Kahlo, complete with flowers and statement wallpaper — a nod to one of the world’s most iconic artists, who created while living with chronic pain and physical limitation. The other has its own distinct identity, adding another layer of surprise to the space.
Even small layout choices mattered. The house was already large enough to accommodate wheelchair access because a winery had occupied it before, but one sink had to be moved farther into the corner after her landlord pointed out that its placement would limit usability.
“Oh God, I’m so glad you thought of that,” she recalls telling him. “Because I already have so much brain burn going on.”
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Domestic, But Make It Defiant
People often tell Nicole that Housewife Rebellion is a brilliant brand concept. She laughs at that.
“It was never a brand,” she says. “It was just me.”
The work grew naturally out of earlier series featuring superheroes and sci-fi characters in mundane domestic scenes. But the housewife pieces hit differently because they are more personal. They play with expectation, femininity and frustration, turning familiar visual language into something sharper and more subversive.
At its core, the rebellion is not against domestic life itself. The dishes still need washing. The laundry still needs doing. But Nicole’s work refuses to let the women doing it fade into the wallpaper. Her housewives are funny, feminine, and fully in on the joke — background figures recast as the main event.
One painting, “Miss Mary Jane,” depicts a seemingly proper housewife in her garden, though not the kind most neighbors would expect. Another, featuring a tea tray with “pairings” of Xanax and Vicodin, was licensed by a theater company in Poland for its production of “All About My Mother” and continues to appear each time the play runs.
“My art is very true to who I am,” Nicole says. “It’s part of my personality.”
She describes herself as deeply introverted, which may help explain why the work is so direct. It says the quiet part out loud for her.
Drink the Wine, Keep the Rebellion
At Housewife Rebellion, visitors will find paintings for sale alongside the wine. Some pieces come from Nicole’s personal collection. Others live on the bottles themselves, with labels designed to feel as display-worthy as what hangs on the walls.
“The bottles should be on the shelf,” she says.
At home, she keeps one of her rosé bottles with a rose tucked inside. Just switch out the flower, she says, and it becomes part of the room. Her idea is simple: “One bottle to drink, one to keep.”
The garage is quieter now. The bar that sat hidden from public view for months has had its reveal. The Frida Kahlo bathroom is open. The wine is finally out in the world.
Nicole spent years painting in stolen hours, building something in pieces. Now, just off Grapevine’s Main Street, Housewife Rebellion has a permanent address.