From Wine-Wiki

Introduction

Wine has the start command to Start a program, or open a document using the program normally used for files with a particular suffix, but it needs you to invoke the wine cmd first.

wine cmd 

This then shows a dos like command line which will likely look like [dec 09]

Z:\[your home folder]>

Now you can invoke start:

start [options] program_filename [...]
start [options] document_filename

Options as of dec 09:

/M[inimized] Start minimized.

/MAX[imized] Start maximized.

/R[estored] Start a program normally.

/W[ait] Wait for the program to finish, then exit with its exit code.

/Unix Use a Unix filename and start the file like windows explorer.

/ProgIDOpen Open a document using a progID.

/L Show end-user license.

/B is ingored, as of August 09 which allows scripts using it to often still work Winehq Bugzilla entry 10912

Forum comments

wine user Jan 10: A user queried: there are two option to launch "wine start".

With Unix option :

wine start /U /media/cdrom/setup.exe

Or without but with a Windows path,

wine start D:/setup.exe.

If i use the Unix option, i must add my cdrom drive in winecfg or only without /U ? C. Davis: Either way, Wine has to be able to see the drive. Which means you have to add your CD-ROM drive in winecfg. Oh, and the /Unix option has to be spelled in full, [..]

V. Povirk: It really needs to be /unix

wine start /unix /media/cdrom/setup.exe

We don't accept /u in case Microsoft adds their own /u switch to start.exe.