[Wine] New to Linux and Wine, need to know a few things

[semint]

Hello, I hadn't installed Linux in quite a while and recently I installed Linux Mint 12 in a VMware VM and I really like it, especially the font rendering which is much closer to Mac OS X and far from the terrible font smoothing on Windows.

In fact I like it so much that I'm contemplating the idea of installing as my primary OS and using Wine for some Windows apps, only switching to native Windows for heavy things like video editing.

But I have no clue how Wine works. What I would do is keep Windows where it's at right now, and free one of the three hard drives in my PC and install Mint 12 there. So if I do it that way, can I run the Windows apps from the current Windows installation, or will I have to install another Windows in a VM environment within Linux and run them from there? That would be a deal breaker because I wouldn't buy another copy of Windows to be able to run Wine.