From Wine-Wiki

[edit] Introducton

According to the source http://source.winehq.org/source/programs/winelauncher.in, Winelauncher is a shell script that attempts to intelligently manage the process of launching a program with Wine. It adds some level of visual feedback to an end user.

Usage: winelauncher [options] "<windows program> [program arguments]" This script is meant to be installed to /usr/bin/wine, and to be used to invoke a Windows executable. The options are passed through directly to Wine, and are documented in the Wine man page.

[edit] Forum Comments

[Nov 06] why is it bad to use "winelauncher"?

V. Margolen:There are number of reasons:

1. It outputs different information from normal "wine" command. This is confusing to user as well as person who trying to debug the problem.
2. It's hard-coded to the default WINEPREFIX. More and more users starting to use other prefixes for testing purposes or just to separate applications.
3. It's not well maintained.
4. It does not work with wine from source directory or custom "wine" scripts. I don't have Wine installed but I have custom ~/bin/wine script. The winelauncher was unable to find nor start wine properly in this configuration.