Having spent her life in the wine industry, Josephine Perry wants to do her part for sustainability. “My grandfather, whom I was very close with, was a brewer at Swan for 33 years and he told me when I was 14 I should be a winemaker – so that’s what I did,” Perry tells Broadsheet. Eventually, Perry reached a breaking point, motivated by the overwhelming amount of waste in wine production, particularly when it comes to bottling and packaging.
Enter Fangbone: a new sustainable bottling program introduced by Perry’s Margaret River winery Dormilona. Fangbone’s bottles are known as boomerangs because “they go out, see the world and then come back home.”
Corked one-litre bottles – hand-filled with Dormilona chenin, 2023 orenji or 2024 tinto – are on the shelves in bottle shops now. They cost between $25 and $30 with a $10 deposit for a single bottle, or a $50 deposit for a crate of six.
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SUBSCRIBE NOWOnce you’ve drunk your wine, you take it back to the bottle shop, where it’s picked up and transported back to the winery. There it’s cleaned, sanitised and air-dried before being refilled and put back into circulation.
When you return your bottle (or crate), you can pick up a fresh one, or choose to opt out of the program and get your deposit refunded.
Fangbone bottles are available at: Old Bridge Cellars in both Como and North Fremantle, Mane Osborne Park, the South West Wine Shop and the Dormilona cellar door. Fangbone wine is also being poured at Lawson Flats, Normal Van, Settlers Tavern and at Busselton Pavilion in Margaret River.
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