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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 20 years.
It’s a daily pleasure to provide lovers of fine food across Australia with authentic, high-quality sourdough bread and baked goods.
After years spent building our respective law careers in the big smoke of Melbourne, we felt like it was time for a reset. Alongside our corporate lives, we had spent some time in the 1990s experiencing a particularly memorable vintage in France, 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 move to the country and turned our passion for quality sourdough bread 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 to a small number of retailers along Victoria’s Great Ocean Road.
We said goodbye to the suits, briefcases and the relentless traffic of Melbourne, 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 Scotsman John Calvert. 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.
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, oat biscuits and festive baked goods, and even a selection of wines that are produced from vineyards we planted on the volcanic soils of the region.
We might have since outgrown our bakery in the stables, but we still bake on-site at Irrewarra in a new purpose-built building, set among the farms, fields and freshwater lakes of the former Irrewarra Estate.
Today our bread reaches 25,000 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 dream into a reality.
