The ancient civilisations of the Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Chinese, Persians and Phoenicians were probably already involved in the deliberate cultivation of plants and therefore also grape varieties based on wild vines. The fact that new varieties could be obtained by sowing seeds had probably been known for a very long time. The Persians and later the Arabs in the early Middle Ages probably already deliberately bred large-berried table grapes, which spread throughout the Mediterranean region as far as Spain. Modern breeding as a deliberate, manually induced crossing of two parent varieties with the targeted use of paternal pollen probably only began in Christian Europe with the start of botanical systematics, for which Carl von Linné (1707-1778) and Charles Darwin (1809-1882) laid the scientific foundations.
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