Comment 16 for bug 571999

but in karmic debian/control says
Package: wine1.2
Architecture: any
Section: otherosfs
Pre-Depends: dpkg (>= 1.14.12ubuntu3)
Depends: procps, binfmt-support (>= 1.1.2), ${shlibs:Depends}
Recommends: ttf-tahoma-replacement, ttf-symbol-replacement, ttf-liberation, winbind, wine1.2-gecko, ttf-mscorefonts-installer
Suggests: xdg-utils
Conflicts: wine (<< 1.2), binfmt-support (<< 1.1.2), winesetuptk, wine-doc, wine-utils, libwine-alsa, libwine-arts, libwine-capi, libwine-cms, libwine-esd, libwine-gl, libwine-gphoto2, libwine-jack, libwine-ldap, libwine-nas, libwine-print, libwine-sane, libwine-twain, xwine, libwine
Replaces: wine (<< 1.2), winesetuptk, wine-doc, wine-utils, libwine-alsa, libwine-arts, libwine-capi, libwine-cms, libwine-esd, libwine-gl, libwine-gphoto2, libwine-jack, libwine-ldap, libwine-nas, libwine-print, libwine-sane, libwine-twain, xwine

Just a blind guess, but would that mean that during an upgrade dpkg keep the older or the highest version of the conflicting package ?