During Wei and Jin, drinking has become fashion of the times. “Wine” infiltrated literati’s souls and writings, and became the media for expressing thoughts and emotions. Among these literati, Tao Yuanming is the one who most frequently brought the subject of wine into his poetry, “connecting wine and poetry, ” and almost “mentioning wine in his every poem.” Previous research has explored Tao Yuanming’s motivation of drinking, as well as studied the inner structure of the set of twenty poems titled “Drinking Wine”. Instead of following these routes, the present study tries to explore the achievement and influence of the writing about wine in Tao’s poetry from the perspective of literary themes. Therefore, I will assemble his poems describing wine and inspired by wine, to study the unique character of Tao’s drinking poems, as well as the important part they played in later tradition of the poetry-wine literature. Xiao Tong’s theory of “expressing one’s feelings through drinking” is the first discussion about the relationship between Tao’s poems and wine, emphasizing that the poet’s “intention didn’t end at drinking itself,” and that he used getting drunk as a camouflage, and wine as a means. This theory has established the interpretative tradition for reading Tao Yuanming’s drinking poetry, and this article intends to first analyze its influence. The second point of this study is to directly analyze the implications of Tao Yuanming’s drinking poems. I will observe the various states of mind expressed through these poems from four aspects: the warmth of human nature, the comfort for loneliness, the transcendence and transformance of fate, and the pursuit of the mystical experience of merging oneself with the universe. I will further analyze that Tao not only inherited the traditional theme of drinking for the relief from grief, but also developed themes that were different from the past work. For example, he described the poor literati who loved wine and the state of drunken ecstasy, as well as the scenes of drinking alone in a thatched hut and of enjoying drinking with country people. I will also explain the new scenery opened up by the drinking themes of Tao’s poems in terms of three points: expressing feelings through wine, new topics for the wine poems, and the aesthetics of drinking. Tao Yuanming never avoided the subject of drinking in his prose and poetry, but wrote about drinking in volumes, presenting the refined pleasure of daily life, implying the elevation of human life in these poems, and thus forming a literary theme. Therefore, exploring Tao Yuanming’s writing about wine not only helps us understand Tao Yuanming’s personality and drinking hobby, but also offers a different perspective to consider Tao Yuanming’s position and influence in the history of literature.