JOSEPHINE PERRY

MARGARET RIVER, WA

“OUR WINE IS PURE TO ITS VARIETY.”

JOSEPHINE PERRY

A globe-trotting wine career, including a memorable time in Spain, led to Margaret River label Dormilona.

Fermenting runs in Josephine Perry’s blood. As a child, she was tasked with helping her grandfather clean his house on Wednesdays, but instead, she says, he taught her how to ferment – “from apricots to grain to grapes”. While still at school and looking for work experience, her grandfather, who was the brewer at Swan Brewery for many years, arranged for her to work at Margaret River’s Cape Mentelle winery. “I was 14 and have never thought of doing anything else since,” says Perry.

Perry’s career has taken her all over the winemaking world, from the French winemaking hotspots of Burgundy, Bordeaux and the Rhône to New Zealand and California. But it was in Spain’s Galicia, where she lived for seven years, that she earned the nickname that would eventually inspire her wine brand.

“I used to fall asleep before dinner. Being Australian, I would wake early to go for a surf or run, while the Spanish don’t even get out of bed until noon. Typically, Spanish dinner time is at 10-11pm. So, by the time this came around I was asleep. The amount of times my friends would come to my apartment at 1-2am and get me out of bed for fiestas was very common. Hence, ‘dormilona’, which translates as sleepyhead or lazy bones.”

Perry returned to Australia in 2013 and started Dormilona in Western Australia’s Margaret River, a region venerated for its cabernet and chardonnay. Her wine is made with organic fruit, no additives, fining or filtration and, in the case of her Clayface range, aged in terracotta amphorae. Her aim, she says, is simply to make wine that she enjoys drinking: “Nothing added, nothing taken away – wine that is pure to its variety and expresses brightness to the vineyard and vintage.”