Science

Nah, much like shit gets tested on mice, tobacco is the goto for testing on plants.

Yeah, there's time we need to test on pigs and whatnot. But mice are usually good enough in multiple domains, cheap to get a lot, and are pretty easy to handle in a lab. So that's the usual selection for testing shit on.

Pretty much same deal with tobacco, checks enough boxes for interesting things to test against, is super cheap, and pretty straightforward for dealing with in a lab.

You do initial testing on dummy cheap shit. Once you work out the bugs on the cheap thing, pretty much you do roughly the same thing on the expensive stuff that you're actually going to sell.

Tobacco is super cheap and editing the seed gene on it is pretty similar to the seed gene in grapes. So you do most of the work on cheap ass tobacco. When you've got tobacco down switching that same process over to grape only requires a few tweaks.