The cultivated grapevine is 99% monoecious with hermaphroditic flowers. It is 99% self-fertilizing but can also be cross-fertilized. The wild vines are mostly dioecious, meaning plants with exclusively male or exclusively female flowers, thus excluding self-fertilization. In monoecious plants, both sexes occur on one plant.
The flowers can be unisexual, so that male and female flowers occur on the same plant but in separate inflorescences, or they are hermaphroditic flowers, in which male and female sexual organs are united in one flower. The grapevine is a covered seed plant. This means the flower bud is covered with the flower envelope (perianth), which opens or is shed during flowering to enable pollination (and immediately subsequent fertilization). Generally, cultivated grape varieties are bisexual. However, there are also unisexual (female) varieties with exclusively female flower organs.
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