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The Israeli government, worried about the EU market which is the destination for 20 per cent of the country’s exports, is lobbying hard against this. But it is losing the argument as European officials, angered by Israel’s aggressive settlement expansion, have started urging member states to label goods as products of settlements not only wine, but also skin cream, fruit and vegetables, and industrial goods.

Labels on the wine might state either “Produce of the West Bank (Israeli settlement produce)” or “Israeli produce of the Occupied Palestinian Territories”.

Yaakov Berg drinks wine beside oak barrels in a cave dating from the Second Temple Period (Debbie Hill for the Telegraph)

The intention would be to enable consumers to make an “informed choice” not to buy such produce – like The Co-operative Group, the UK’s fifth biggest retailer, which last year became the first major British company to announce that it would no longer buy from suppliers which do business with the settlements.

But the settlers, whose toil and enterprise has produced one of the most successful Israeli industries, regard labelling wine in this way as victimisation. “This is pure racism,” said Yaakov Berg, 38, whose parents arrived penniless in Israel from Russia in 1973. Nearly a decade ago he founded one of the most successful vineyards, Psagot, near Jerusalem. From 3,000 bottles of wine a year when it started it now produces 120,000 annually.

“Nobody else in the world is singled out like this except the Jews,” Mr Berg said. “Given Europe’s history of labelling the Jews, this is deeply worrying. Remember the stars Jews were made to wear?

“I didn’t kill anyone to take this land, I paid for it, and I provide good jobs for Palestinians that pay three or four times what they could earn elsewhere.”

Mr Berg, a father of three, said he acquired an interest in farming from his immigrant father who planted nectarines and cherries because he wanted to grow something in the soil of Israel. After a spell in the army he worked briefly in a vineyard in Australia, before coming home to start his own winery in a “desert” that he bought.

It was the middle of the second “intifada”, the uprising against Israel’s occupation that continued for the first five years of the last decade. “I was pruning by day, getting shot at by night,” he said.

After a couple of years he realised that the quality of the grapes was exceptional. He has won several prizes for his wine in competitions abroad, including in France, and the winery has been a financial success. But that is not what really motivates him.

Read more:

Israel’s vineyards: the West Bank grapes of wrath