When Noach goes out of the ark the first thing he does (arguably; perhaps the korbanos he offered on his newly-built mizbayach came first) is plant a vineyard. And the ensuing happenings involve him getting drunk and not being particularly clothed. What’s going on?
Well, one approach is that Noach was seeing whether the world had now returned to its lofty level before Adam’s sin; HaShem cursed Adam that thorns would grow from his plantings, and the ground would be cursed (3;17-18). Noach was thus seeing whether the world had been removed of this curse by testing out its fertility. But this does not explain why a vineyard, particularly, was planted, and why Noach then produced wine and didn’t eat the grapes as they are. Thus…
(This part is basically all R Tatz). The physical world is defined by decay – all physical things rot away eventually. This is why it says that a tzaddik increases wisdom as he ages (‘od yenuvun beseiva‘ we say every Friday night, as R Yossi echoes in gemarra shabbes 142a); since he is not limited to the physical attributes of decay. Wine, interestingly enough, gets better the older it is – it is not completely part of the physical world. The answer has thus been given that Noach thought – after the world’s new beginning and his rise to internalising the middah of chesed – that it was time for a raise in kedusha (and possibly even time of Moshiach), and so needed to have wine. (As an aside, it’s interesting that one opinion on the gemarra – and that of the Zohar – is that the fruit that Adam HaRishon ate from in the original sin was grapes). So too were the spiritual giants Nadav and Avihu, sons of Aharon, drunk on the last day of the miluim (inauguration) of the Mishkan, the day on which the Shechinah would descend, found drunk in the holy of holies, because of this message of, and spiritual content of, wine.
Please g-d may we all merit developing ourselves as people of true chesed
Have a great shabbes
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