Re: Wine to the rescue!
"The official Linux Mint site only offered me 17.3 yesterday - will go looking."
You must have just missed it, LM 18 (stable) was very recently available on Linuxmint.com. Don't worry about the dark colour scheme, you can change it to something less modern and then customise it.
You might prefer the MATE desktop which is more 'traditional' than Cinnamon.