Bar Cabinet

I'm about to design a cabinet for a bar-type area. This will be an under-counter cabinet with doors, except there will be an area above the doors that will hold a horizontal row of wine bottles. These bottles will be stored as a traditional wine rack with an open front and scalloped racks to hold the bottles.

My question is about between the upper wine rack and lower cabinet. I'm trying to decide whether or not to put a panel in between which would amount to a floor for the wine rack and a top for the cabinet or leave it open between the two. If I leave it open, one could look through the rack, between the bottles, and see inside the cabinet but, if I put the panel in, the floor of the wine rack would be a good place to gather dust or, perhaps get something spilled there somehow, without an easy way to clean and maintain, having to remove all the bottles and work in between the wine rack and the top. Something tells me it would always look dirty in there.

Another idea I thought of is to install the panel but put something like a drawer liner in so, when it needed to be cleaned, I could just remove and clean or replace. What would you do ?

So it is a single row of bottles? The scalloped racks will sit on that floor? Make them removable. You could drive screws up from the cabinet area into the underside of the racks. Or, for a tool-free removal, you could impale the racks on a couple of vertical pegs. You just lift the rack off the pegs, clean the dust out, and drop the rack back on the pegs.

Thanks, Jamie. Good idea.