(LATimes) - For better or worse, and in some cases both, American wine drinkers are in thrall with the Blend. The wines, composed of three, four, five or more unidentified and often disparate red varieties, emblazoned with flashy names and at times lurid identity systems, represent one of the fastest-growing segments in the country.

The trend has big wine companies scrambling to capitalize on demand. The Prisoner brand, a Napa Valley blend conceived in 2000 by a young winemaker named Dave Phinney, has been sold twice in the last seven years, most recently to the world’s second-largest wine company, Constellation. And one year ago Phinney sold his own label, Orin Swift (from which the Prisoner had been freed, so to speak, in 2009) to the world’s largest wine company, Gallo.

For the big wine companies, with their vast vineyard holdings and surplus juice, the trend has been downright liberating. Tied neither to variety nor place, the wines can be made from anything, come from anywhere, and consumers no longer seem to care about what they don’t know.