Ibn Salaama, in his book الناسخ والمنسوخ في القرآن الكريم, pages 33-35, does an excellent job of narrating the circumstances of revelation of "the five verses that prohibited intoxication", 2:219 being one of them. Then he concludes that 2:219 was abrogated!
Here are the five verses he talked about:
Some realized the verse prohibits alcohol and they stopped, but others did not understand it as such and thought it was an enumeration of bounties from God
and continued drinking.
Same thing happened. Then Muhammad ibn Abdillah ibn `Awf Az-Zuhri invited people and served them wine until they all were drunk. Then it was Maghrib (Sunset prayer) time. They prayed in a congregation and had Abu-Bakr ibn Ja`fara, their best reciter, lead the prayer. He recited Chapter 109, but, because he was drunk, he said "I do not worship" when he should have said "I do worship" and "I worship" when he should have said "I do not worship"!
When the news reached the Prophet (PBUH), he felt terrible. Then God revealed,
So, what did Muslims do? Some realized, finally, that intoxication is forbidden and stopped, but others still did not. They would drink after `Ishaa' (night prayer) and sometimes after Fajr (dawn prayer), but not between Zhuhr (noon prayer) and Maghrib. One of those was Sa`d ibn Abi-Waqqaas, may God have been pleased with him. He invited people, in Medina, to dinner and they got drunk. One of the guests got rowdy and hit Sa`d in the jaw! Sa`d went to the Prophet (PBUH) to complain, and God revealed
The fifth verse, which scholars said was the decisive ruling about intoxication is
Because, they argued, the question "Will you then cease" is a command to cease, which they did.
Ibn Salaama says that some scholars have said that the prohibition actually came a lot earlier, in
Because the Arabs have referred to alcoholic beverages as
الإثم, such as in these poems,
تبوأت الإثم حتى ضل عقلي ... كذلك الإثم يلعب بالعقول
تشرب الإثم بالكؤوس جهارا ... وترى المثل بيتا مستعارا