How to temporarily disable PulseAudio?

You can use pasuspender. Try prefixing your wine command with it.

pasuspender -- wine path/to/file.exe

In /etc/pulse/client.conf, you can uncomment the line autospawn=yes and replace the yes with a "no". Of course this should be possible to set this in .pulse directory in your home directory.

A cleaner way to do this would be to create a client.conf in your .pulse dir in ~ and put the line "autospawn=no" in it. It would be good to turn back on autospawn after you have done what you need to do.

In my case, I was unable to stop pulseaudio since it was being restarted automatically by systemctl.

The proper way to stop pulseaudio, in that case is:

systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.socket
systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.service

To start it again, you can use:

systemctl --user start pulseaudio.socket
systemctl --user start pulseaudio.service