Comment 40 for bug 367379

ubuntnoob: I've had much more success recently with disabling pulseaudio:

1. Edit /etc/pulse/client.conf and set "autospawn = no"
2. pulseaudio -k
3. start your game

Works like charm for the last few weeks.

As for speed, you may get better performance on the latest (beta) builds directly from wine themselves. Follow the instructions on their site to try it out: http://www.winehq.org/download/deb