Wine played a key role in the ancient world, where safe, reliable water sources were scarce. It could be stored for long periods of time; if lightly fermented it was rich in sugar content; it was high in mineral content; it tasted good and generally had intoxicating qualities. Thus it was a valuable commodity and treated with reverence.

Wine is, of course, made from grapes. Grapes – sweet, juicy, nutritious and full of energy-rich fructose – represent the Lord's own exquisite desire to be good to us. That's powerful stuff! But grapes have a short shelf life; you might eat a bunch for a burst of energy, but you can't exactly carry them around with you for long-term sustenance. And so it is with desires for good: They tend to come to us in energizing bursts, but fade away fairly quickly. We need something more stable and lasting.

At some point in the distant past people figured out that if you squeeze the juice from the grapes and let it ferment, the result is a liquid that offers that stability: wine. The spiritual meaning works the same way; if we examine our desires for good, try to understand and think about how to apply them, what we will get are concepts about what good really is, how to recognize it and how to make it happen. And just like the wine, these ideas offer stability and portability. For instance, finding a wallet full of cash on the sidewalk might severely test our desire to be honest, but the idea that "you shall not steal" is pretty hard to shake.

Wine, then, on the deepest level represents divine truth flowing from divine goodness – the true principles that arise from the fact that the Lord loves us and desires everything good for us.

Wine comes in many varieties, though, and is used in many ways. Depending on context it can represent truth that arises from a desire for good on much more mundane levels. You want your children to be healthy so you make them brush their teeth even though they complain and it's a pain in the neck; the truth that brushing their teeth is good for them is wine on a very day-to-day level.

In some cases wine can also actually represent good things that arise from true ideas, something of a reverse from its inmost meaning. This happens when we are in transitional stages, setting higher ideas and principles above our less-worthy desires in an effort to reshape our actions. In that case our principles are the things being squeezed, with good habits the result.

There is also, of course, a darker side to wine. There is a good deal of debate about just how much alcohol wine had in Biblical times, and some of it may indeed have been more like concentrated grape juice. But there are also many references to wine and drunkeness, so some of it, at least, was fairly potent.

On a spiritual level, getting drunk on wine represents relying too much on our ideas, taking logic to such an extreme that we forget the good things we were trying to achieve in the first place.

(Odkazy: Apocalypse Explained 376 [1-40], 1152; Apocalypse Revealed 316, 635; Arcana Coelestia 1071 [1-5], 1727, 3580 [1-4], 5117 [7], 6377, 10137 [1-10]; The Apocalypse Explained 329 [2-4]; The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine 219)

3464. 'And pointed out to him the reasons for the well which they had dug; and they said to him, We have found water' means interior truths obtained by means of these. This is clear from the meaning of 'a well' as the Word, dealt with in 3424, and from the meaning of 'water' as truths, dealt with in 2702, that is to say, truths drawn from the Word. 'Pointing out to him the reasons for the well which they had dug' accordingly means concerning the Word, the source of matters of doctrine; 'and they said to him, We have found water' means that it is in these, that is to say, in matters of doctrine, that interior truths reside; for as stated above, all matters of doctrine drawn from the literal sense of the Word include interior truths within them. For the literal sense of the Word is like a well with water in it, in that every single thing in the Word holds within itself the internal sense, which resides also in matters of doctrine drawn from the Word.

[2] The situation with matters of doctrine drawn from the literal sense of the Word is that when anyone possesses them and at the same time lives according to them a correspondence exists within himself. For the angels who reside with him are alive to the interior truths when he is alive to the exterior; and in this way he has communication with heaven by means of matters of doctrine, though this is conditioned by how good a life he leads. For example, when at the Holy Supper this person in simplicity thinks about the Lord from the words 'This is My body' and 'This is My blood' the angels residing with him have in mind love to the Lord and charity towards the neighbour; for love to the Lord corresponds to the Lord's body and to the bread, while charity towards the neighbour corresponds to His blood and to the wine, 1798, 2165, 2177, 2187. This being the nature of the correspondence, there flows from heaven by way of the angels into that holiness present with the person at that time an affection which he receives according to the good within his life.

[3] Actually angels dwell with every person in the affection that belongs to his life, and so in the affection for the matters of doctrine according to which he lives, but never in the matters of doctrine with which his life is at variance. If his life is at variance with them, as it is if his affection is to gain position and wealth for himself by means of matters of doctrine, the angels in that case depart and spirits from hell dwell in that affection. These either instill their confirmations into him that favour self and the world - thus a false persuasion, which is such that he does not care at all whether a thing is true or false, provided people's attention is drawn to himself - or they take away all faith, in which case the doctrine on that person's lips is merely a sound prompted and fashioned by the fire of those loves.