It’s here that our story begins – and where it continues to thrive. This land is home to our family’s heritage as well as our renowned artisan bakery.
Irrewarra is known for producing Victoria’s most-loved sourdough and Australia’s finest granola. We have been using traditional methods and simple, natural ingredients for more than 25 years.
It’s a daily pleasure to provide lovers of fine food across Australia with authentic, high-quality sourdough bread, crunchy granola, quintessential Australian Anzac biscuits and festive treats.
After years spent building our respective law careers in the big smoke of Melbourne, and time on the family farm, we reached a turning point in our lives. We had spent some time in the 1990s experiencing a particularly memorable wine vintage in Burgundy France, before starting our family, and teaching ourselves how to make sourdough bread at home.
So on New Year’s Day 1999 we asked ourselves the question – what if we turned our passion for baking and winemaking into a business?
A year later, it was happening: in the summer of the new millennium, we started supplying hand-cut, hand-moulded, naturally fermented loaves using our home-nurtured sourdough culture (started in 1995 when our son Jack was born) to a small number of retailers along Victoria’s Great Ocean Road and prepared to plant a vineyard the following year.
We said goodbye to the suits, briefcases and the relentless traffic of Melbourne, and to the family farm west of Geelong, and welcomed aprons, early starts and a new pursuit of quality in both ingredients and breadmaking craft. We set up our home and business on a patch of land in the Victorian Western District farming region that had a deep connection to our family – located at Irrewarra was the Calvert family ancestral land, first settled four generations ago by Scots John Calvert and Jane Murray. The run-down former stables was a perfect restoration project, and we built our small bakery in a wing of the historic building.
And so, Irrewarra Sourdough Bakery was born. The following year Irrewarra Vineyard took root.
For our family and our broader team of bakers and craftspeople, the pursuit of quality continues today. We pride ourselves on our signature long-ferment sourdough breads, our artisan granola range, Anzac biscuits and festive baked goods. The vineyard we passed onto award winning winemakers, By Farr, to make the sublime Irrewarra Wine since 2010.
We outgrew our bakery in the stables, eventually building a new purpose-built 2000m2 bakery, set among the fields of the former Irrewarra Station.
Today our bread reaches 28,000 Victorian homes weekly, and our granola and biscuits are enjoyed by many more people nationally. Our iconic products are now much-loved and sought-after among lovers of quality artisan food – and it’s with this knowledge we feel satisfied that all those years ago, we made the right choice: to pursue our vision of quality and excellence, and turn our bread and wine passion into a reality.
