Removing the front panel is a great idea. You can display some dishes, glasses or nick backs there. It might be a good idea to add glass doors over the front to prevent everything from getting dusty up there. Good luck!

First off the bottles are in backwards the neck should be facing out and up :)
I would remove it if possible ,as you said not a very good place to store wine ,heat rises and wine doesn't like it .
It depends on how it looks on the inside ,remove the top and if there is a shelf in there use it for baskets to keep your serviettes in.

Yes remove the front panel. Add a big plant or some colorful bottles and pots. You need some color. By the way you do not put wine bottles in that way cork is facing out.

That's exactly how you would place wine bottles in a riddling rack, so why not here?

Thanks everyone! Any more suggestions are greatly appreciated!

In case you are wondering if you should or shouldn't keep wine on top of the fridge ,here is a little info on it .
http://wine.about.com/od/storingwines/a/storingwine.htm

We had a wine rack on top of frig & it gets hot up there which is not good for the wine. I would remove front, place some beautiful vases or plants up there, or perhaps a large colorful plate in a stand

Cabinets over refrigerators always look best when they are the same depth as the refrigerator. If you are planning on leaving the oak cabinets as they are it will be hard to match the wood. You might consider making a new cabinet and painting all the upper cabinets a contrast color and leaving the lower cabinets in the stained oak. Or just painting the wall of cabinets with the refrigerator a contrast color (such as sage green, mid gray or navy blue) depending on other colors in the room or adjacent rooms.

Keep it as is, and get ready for giant game of Connect Four.

You need to pull the front of that even with the front of the fridge... it should be possible to replace the side panel and stain to match, and make that a storage bit with doors.

Yes, if you're going through the trouble of a reno, get rid of it entirely. Hopefully the wall behind it was paneled in the same oak. Do you have a wider shot? There appears to be a beam there?

We have now removed the front panel of this never been used wine rack, and here is what it looks like inside. Not tooooo bad. Problem is the spacing between shelves makes it questionable as to what do I store there? We are thinking of removing the shelves? Not sure what to do! Lots of great feed back! Thank you all! Keep it coming!

its hard to reach anything up there anyway so it's a good area for little used things. you could remove one of the shelves to give a little more height and store flat things on the other shelf. if you have cats you could remove all the shelves and boom cat bed. lol.