When all you manly men sit down to watch Super Bowl XLVI Sunday, you will of course be gorging on manly snack fare – spicy chicken wings, mile-high nachos, pigs-in-blankets, watercress sandwiches with the crusts cut off – that requires a manly wine to wash down. (I know that many of you will be drinking beer, but I promise that there’s nothing manly about Bud Light.)

So, as to the manly wine, you could not do better than the Airfield Estate Bombshell Red 2009, from Washington state’s Yakima Valley. Yes, I recommended this winery’s Riesling 2010 last week. They’re on a roll.

My first note on this wine was “Robust but not rustic.” Since so much of criticism is subjective, what the heck did I mean by that comment?

I would say – Education Alert! – that a robust wine is full-bodied, vigorous and boldly flavorful; a rustic wine, on the other hand, feels a bit rough around the edges, may be both hearty and hardy, but is primarily unsophisticated, direct and even blunt in its appeal. Such rustic wines have a place in the Grand Scheme, and we have all enjoyed them, particularly on their home ground, or lying on the ground.

Nothing rustic about Bombshell Red ’09, though robust it definitely is. The wine is mainly a blend of merlot and syrah grapes with dollops of malbec, sangiovese and petit verdot. It puts ripe fleshy slightly tarry black currant, plum and blueberry tart aromas and flavors right out front and backs them up with plenty of dense chewy tannins, spicy oak, earthy-graphite minerality and the after-burner power of 15.1 percent alcohol.

Bring on the barbecue sliders!