I live in Napa Valley and I often get a bit defensive when I read what outside observers say about the posh life and over-the-top wineries here. When I first moved to the valley in 1979 the place was hardly toney — Main Street in St. Helena at the time had a Western Auto Store downtown and two scuzzy hotels with dive bars. I have not been able to totally accept the outside media’s view of Napa as a rural version of Fifth Avenue.

In the valley today, wild, off-the-beaten-track roads still wait for cars to accelerate over them, giant hawks and eagles soar overhead, coyotes howl from the ridgetops on moonlit nights and a good number of down-to-earth people still work their jobs, raise their kids, bitch about taxes and the rich noob vintners’ various follies and — here’s where it does get a bit different from mid-America — throw middle of the week potluck parties with up to $1,000-a-bottle BYOB wines.

The party I’m thinking of occurs several times each summer on Atlas Peak on the east side of the valley on the Antinori California property. The manager of the Tuscan wine family’s Napa property, Glenn Salva, hosts a loosely organized barbecue about once a month in the property’s no-frills 1980s ranch house/office with a gravel driveway, no landscaping and a killer view, where a couple of Atlas Peak old-timers grill or slow-barbecue the meat, other regulars bring salad, one brings homemade lemon cake, somebody makes ranch beans, and everybody brings a bottle of wine to share.

This is a totally guy affair. The guys range from vineyard foremen and small landowners who were born on and will probably die on Atlas Peak, to painting contractors, general contractors, private bankers, car dealership managers, winemaker-entrepreneurs and the host, Glenn. He says the Wednesday summer barbecues started about 10 years ago under the informal name of the Billionaire Boys Club. The point was to relax, eat a lot of protein, drink as much as you want, joke, laugh, and watch the sun go down on one of the more remote and beautiful stretches of vineyard in Napa.

It’s probably not a coincidence that Glenn’s wife and daughter spend most of the summer back east with her family. Glenn has a house in Napa, but in the summer stays up on the mountain for days at a time to avoid the half-hour commute down steep and twisting Soda Canyon Road. He gets a bit lonely managing the big property, and likes to have friends over. Glenn says the party organizes itself. Two or three guys usually do the grilling. Someone will bring 20 pounds of line-caught salmon, 40 pounds of ribeyes from CostCo, uncut, or a whole pig to slow roast on a spit starting several hours early. Everybody who doesn’t bring something besides wine throws a $20 bill in a bag that’s passed around.

The wine can be amateur, like the bottle of Gordone Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon 2004 that my home winemaking partner and I brought. We used grapes grown a few hundred yards away on Atlas Peak and it turned out well. But I also brought a bottle of Grgich Hills Cab 2003, which I think was outstanding. I tout the 2003s as being underrated, especially if price cuts start happening as the heavy hitter 2004s hit the market this fall.

At least 20 other wines were uncorked. I didn’t take notes, but one of the most interesting was Ghost Horse, from winemaker Todd Anderson who says the price is $1,000 a bottle. He makes a tiny quantity, doesn’t sell at retail, and will deliver the wine and host a party for the buyer all in a package deal. He likes to throw an extreme sport into the bargain, taking the buyer through a motocross course or, I don’t know, bungee jumping off Stags Leap.

The most newsworthy wine of the night was a 2005 Chardonnay in a “shiner” bottle with no label. This will soon be one of Antinori’s two long-awaited Atlas Peak releases, under the brand name Antica. Glenn says only a few hundred cases of this Chardonnay and a few more hundred cases of an Atlas Peak Cabernet Sauvignon will be released in September.

The Chardonnay is full-bore, all new oak, all malolactic, but still focused and vibrant. I tasted it cold just out of the fridge, but it seemed to have really nice acid, balance and precision in spite of the full-Nelson winemaking. It comes from the coolest, lowest spot on Antinori’s several hundred acres up here. An excellent, mountain grown Chardonnnay.

Antinori’s companion Cabernet wasn’t present that night. I did taste an earlier vintage of this that was never released (2001, I think) and the rap on it was that it was too tannic and tight, yet it was a dense and impressive wine that will probably taste great by 2011. Presumably Piero Antinori and his staff have mellowed the tannins and ripened the fruit a bit for the 2004 initial release. It will be one of the biggest debuts from Napa this fall.

The Billionaire Boys didn’t make a big fuss about this Chardonnay, though. They’re not in general into name-dropping. And they have a thing against pretentiousness. Glenn says the only two by-laws the group set out at the beginning were: no women allowed, not even strippers; and if anyone actually became a millionaire, they would be banned. Looking around the porch where guys were slicing through their rib-eyes and slugging down Cabernet, he says, “We’re not really enforcing that one, because a few of these guys have probably made it by now.”

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