Is there a doctor in the winery?

Wisconsin and Missouri aren’t exactly the first states that leap to mind when you think of America’s great winegrowing regions. Nor does Costa Mesa -- Costa Mesa? -- fall trippingly off the tongue when you name the California towns best known for winemaking.

But it was in Wisconsin that Julie Thompson worked her first wine harvests, during the summers between semesters at the University of Wisconsin medical school. And it was in Missouri that Jeff Dobkin worked his first wine harvests when he, too, was studying medicine, at the University of Missouri.

And Costa Mesa -- on the ground floor of a two-story commercial building, sandwiched between a computer graphics office and a surf-wear shop -- is the unlikely setting where these two wiry doctors (who have become somewhat disenchanted with the practice of medicine) are now making their impressive, small-production Thompkin Cellars Cabernet Franc.

Cabernet Franc has long been used largely as a blending grape in Bordeaux and California. It ripens earlier than Cabernet Sauvignon, and its finesse, elegance, softer tannins and smoother finish help moderate Cabernet Sauvignon’s often aggressive tannins. Cab Franc is a stand-alone or dominant grape, though, in Cheval-Blanc, the great wine of St. Emilion, as well as in the Chinon wines of the Loire Valley, and in several regions of Italy and on the North Fork of Long Island.

In recent years, a few California wineries -- La Jota, Lang & Reed and Robert Sinskey Vineyards among them -- have also begun making stand-alone Cab Francs.

“I like the nose on Cab Franc more than Cabernet Sauvignon,” Dobkin says. “I think it’s more nuanced, and the taste varies more from region to region.”

Thompkin Cellars grows its grapes in Santa Barbara County and does the crushing and destemming there. “It would be too noisy to do here,” explains the woman now known as Julie Thompson-Dobkin (the two were married in 1989). Until the 2003 vintage, the couple made their wine in Santa Barbara. They then decided to start trucking everything down to Costa Mesa, still in the big fermenters (“crushed grapes, juice, stems, bugs and all,” she says), and actually make their wine there.

The ’03 vintage -- fermented, pressed and racked in Costa Mesa -- will be bottled (and released) next year, after a bottling line has been installed.

The Thompkin Cellars wine is called “Couchant” -- soleil couchant is French for “setting sun” -- and it’s a big, powerful wine that smells of chocolate and blackberries and tastes of cherries, pepper and green olives.

I’ve enjoyed Couchant with both a steak and leg of lamb; its density gives it a lingering finish that adds an extra dimension of flavor to the meat, almost as if it were a sauce made for the meat.

Dobkin is the winemaker in the Thompson-Dobkin duo -- his wife is the marketer -- and he says he added about 15% Syrah to his 2001 Couchant “to give more color and a bigger, rounder mouth-feel.” But the 2002 vintage is 100% Cab Franc; it’s still young, of course, and is a bit harsh on the palate right now. Its rougher tannins suggest it will be a longer-lived wine.

“We had cooler weather, so we could harvest later, and we wound up with just the color and mouth-feel we wanted,” he says.

Dobkin, 43, still spends some of his time in nuclear medicine, in Long Beach, specializing in radiology for cancer and heart cases. Thompson-Dobkin, 48, is a consultant in neurology. They got involved in winemaking about the time he grew unhappy with the politics of medicine and she grew unhappy with the bureaucracy.

“Our passion for medicine has dwindled in the face of bureaucratic control, managed care, etc., etc.,” she told me. “Wine is now our passion. It has become our art, our escape.”

Dobkin and Thompson met during his residency, “and one of our first dates was a wine tasting,” she says.

When they got married, her wedding gift to him was a case of white Burgundy.

“We really had the wine bug, so we visited Napa a lot and moved to Santa Barbara to make wine in 1993,” she says. “We made wine in our garage at first, maybe a dozen to 25 cases a year for four or five years. Our friends liked it, so after a while we decided to try to make it commercially.”

A modest setup

I never saw their Santa Barbara garage, but their Costa Mesa winery is certainly the most modest I’ve ever visited. It consists of two small rooms, one painted white, with two small tables covered with test tubes and wine bottles and artwork by the couple’s two young sons.

The main room -- the winery “proper” -- has blue walls, concrete floors, neon lights overhead, three large fermenters, Damy Pere & Fils oak barrels and a single small basket press for the grapes.

Oh yes, there’s also a bathroom. It’s painted green and white, with green paint splatters so pervasive and so random that they appear to have been applied by a Jackson Pollock wannabe after he consumed several bottles of Thompkin Cellars wine.

Thompson-Dobkin laughs at the absurdity of the arrangement. “Some winery, huh?” she says, running her hand through her straight red hair and blinking her hazel eyes. “It used to be a skateboard company.”

The couple made just 150 cases of the 2001 Couchant, their first commercial vintage.

“We have a lot of local folks who decide to start small family wineries and then want us to sell their wine,” says Dan Rhodes of Hi-Time Wine Cellars in Costa Mesa, which is just three miles from the Thompkin winery. “But this wine is something special. It’s a lot different, quite frankly, from what I thought it would be. I was expecting something very California-ish, an overripe jam ball. But this wine really has a European flair to it. I was amazed by the balance and elegance and structure. It goes really well with food.”

The 2002 Thompkin Cellars Cab Franc, all 175 cases of it, is now on the market, having spent two years in barrel. Like the ‘01, it sells for about $25 a bottle at wine shops in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

The couple hopes to expand the winery’s offerings to include a Syrah and a Grenache for the 2004 vintage and to increase total production to 450 or 500 cases for ’04 and double that within a few years.

“We’re not profitable yet,” Dobkin says. “But we’re a real family business. We know that because our 11-year-old son, Adin, helps out, and he’s already started asking for a percentage of the revenue.”

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read previous “Matters of Taste” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-taste.