One of the most popular categories of wines in the last two years is the nearly ubiquitous blended red wine, which is so popular that it has become synonymous with everyday drinking for millions of Americans. A couple of weeks ago, a stranger, hearing I was a wine writer, asked me what I thought of a particularly ordinary although expensive (to me) blended red. I say expensive because it’s about $17 a bottle, but I find it to be worth about $5. And when a wine sells for three times what I suspect it should, I call it expensive. And my reaction to his question was, “Not very much.” I suspected he would agree, but instead he said he thought it was terrific stuff. There wasn’t much for me to reply, but short of spending 20 minutes or so explaining my reasoning, I was left to simply apologize. I said …