http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10952
--- Comment #9 from Jesse Allen the3dfxdude@gmail.com 2007-12-29 22:51:31 --- Whatever happens, with no change to wine, and using newer fontforge, you get marlett instead of maybe tahoma. Sounds like you need to research what fontforge is doing.
Also, what makes you think wine is preferring marlett? The only thing that is different is fontforge.
Wine actually prefers Arial from what I understand, and this was a problem until tahoma was created see, bug 8983, and this patch: http://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/?a=commitdiff_plain;h=7495d814954420c1...
With tahoma and a good fontforge, you should get what you want, afaict.