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Conservation breeding

Special form of vine breeding; see under breeding.

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.

Start of targeted breeding activities

New grape varieties through targeted breeding activities such as seed sowing or crossbreeding were created from the first third of the 19th century, particularly in the greenhouses of England. These included, for example, the table grape varieties Foster's White Seedling and Lady Downe's Seedling. In the middle of the 19th century, many new varieties such as Madeleine Royale and Madeleine Angevine were also created in France, particularly in the nurseries of Anger (Loire).

Professional cross-breeding began in the second third of the 19th century. A real boom in new varieties of fungus-resistant hybrids and phylloxera-resistant rootstocks occurred in connection with the phylloxera and mildew catastrophe from the 1870s, particularly in France, with the breeders Georges Couderc (1850-1928) and Albert Seibel (1844-1936), as well as the Seyve-Villard vineyard, being particularly noteworthy in terms of quantity. Following the great success of Müller-Thurgau, large quantities of new grape varieties were also created in Germany after the First World War. This led to varieties such as Bacchus, Domina, Dornfelder, Dunkelfelder, Huxelrebe, Kerner, Scheurebe, Siegerrebe and many more.

Breeding goals

The general breeding objective in modern viticulture is to produce grape varieties with certain positive, desirable characteristics and traits. New grape varieties with better or, in some cases, completely new characteristics can only be produced by generative (sexual) breeding: two grape varieties with desirable parental characteristics are crossed with each other and the plants that best correspond to the desired ideal variety are selected from the adult seedlings. In maintenance breeding, existing stocks of varieties with degenerative or viral symptoms are improved by selecting the most vigorous, most fertile and healthiest vines. These healthy and virus-free individual vines are then propagated en masse by vegetative (asexual) means, while the degenerated, unfertile vines in the vineyard are eliminated and replaced by the multiplied healthy clones of top quality(clonal breeding).

Once a plant with the desired characteristics has been discovered and selected, this breeding success represented by a single plant can be reproduced by vegetative propagation via cuttings in order to produce enough clone copies in vine nurseries to stock the vineyards. Due to the extremely pronounced heterozygosity in the genome of the grapevine species, plants propagated by sowing seeds split again and therefore no longer have the selected characteristics of the mother plant. For this reason, vegetative propagation is the only way to preserve a selected variety type and to multiply it unchanged (see details under Flowering).

The Community Plant Variety Office ( CPVO ) established by the EU or the national authorities are responsible for granting variety protection for newly bred grape varieties or selected clones in Europe or the individual countries. There are essentially four different breeding strategies, some of which are used in combination. These are cross breeding, selection breeding, mutation breeding and maintenance breeding.

Cross-breeding

This refers to the breeding of new grape varieties by crossing at least two and sometimes several parent varieties by crossing a cross product again (possibly several times). In any case, this is generative (sexual) propagation. The above-mentioned heterozygosity of the vine means that the offspring also have different characteristics from the parents. This basically positive phenomenon is called the heterosis effect. As a rule, the parents are different varieties, which avoids negative inbreeding effects. The seeds intended for...

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Egon Mark
Diplom-Sommelier, Weinakademiker und Weinberater, Volders (Österreich)

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