Hello
Hmm, wine depends on libwine and recommends wine-utils. Since most people install "recommends" as well (aptitude does this), what would be those "many other packages" that are essential for a full featured wine? Maybe it's not clear to the Debian packager that they should be in "recommends" or at least "suggests".
I've just checked this against gentoo, there's also no dependency on xdg-utils. I shall post an ebuild update request to the gentoo-bugzilla.