Winemaking in the battle fields.

(From Off Licence News)

You hear the argument less frequently than you used to, but a significant number of people still believe that wine, like sport, has nothing to do with politics. It was a fiction that was peddled, invariably by apologists for the regimes concerned, in the days of apartheid South Africa, Todor Zhivkov's Bulgaria and Pinochet's Chile; but it's still alive and shrugging its shoulders today. For every principled individual like Steven Spielberg, who resigned as artistic adviser for the 2008 Olympics in protest at China's role in Darfur, there are dozens of governments who would rather bite their diplomatic tongues for "the sake of the Games", not to mention their trade balances.

If you believe most industries have a political dimension - and the greater and more profitable the industry, the broader it tends to be - then wine is no exception. To those of you who are not convinced about this, I would put the following question: what are ethical trade, climate change, globalisation, water usage, labour practices and agricultural subsidies, all of which affect wine to a greater or lesser degree, if they are not political issues? Before you assume that this column has been hijacked by Dave Spart, Private Eye's fictional, far-left conspiracy theorist, perhaps I should explain what's on my mind. I've just been on a five-day wine trip to Israel, visiting wine regions from Upper Galilee to the Golan Heights, Samson to the Judean Hills, as well as attending the second edition of Israwinexpo, a trade show in Tel Aviv, and I can' imagine a more politicised place in which to make wine.

In Israel, life is politics. It is also perpetual conflict. Whatever the rights and wrongs of its treatment of the Palestinians - and there are two sides to this tragic, seemingly insoluble impasse - Israel has been almost permanently at war, or at least on a war footing, since its foundation in 1948. As Mitchell Bard writes in his book Will Israel Survive?, the country's present is so fraught with danger that "most discussions focus on a day, a week, or perhaps a month in advance".

Given what's being going on in the Gaza Strip recently, you can see why life in Israel is so fraught. It is arguably a lot worse for the majority of Palestinians, many of whom live in miserable conditions, but that doesn' lessen ...