Knafeh

Sweet Levantine pastry of shredded filo (kataifi) or fine semolina dough layered over soft white cheese — usually akkawi or a similar mild salty stretching cheese — baked until the pastry goes deep gold and crisp, then drenched in orange-blossom or rose-water syrup while still hot. Served warm, often with crushed pistachio scattered on top. The signature is the salt-sweet contrast — the cheese stays savoury and stretchy under the crisp sugar-soaked pastry — with floral aromatics from the syrup adding the third axis.

Pairs Perfectly

Gewurztraminer Vendange Tardive from Alsace, France. The lychee-rose-orange-blossom aromatic profile is the most precise floral mirror in the wine world for the syrup, the late-harvest sweetness comfortably exceeds the dish, and the high acid handles the cheese richness without going cloying. A Muscat Vendange Tardive from Alsace offers the same Alsatian logic with a sharper grape-floral character at a similar price point.

Pairs Well

Late harvest Torrontés from Salta, Argentina. High-altitude floral aromatics with jasmine, peach, and orange-blossom lift meet the rose-water syrup ingredient by ingredient, and the late-harvest sweetness handles the dish cleanly while the mountain acid keeps it bright.

Moscato d'Asti, Piedmont, Italy. Lightly sparkling, low-alcohol, gently sweet with peach and orange-blossom aromatics that meet the syrup, and the carbonation lifts the dense pastry — the easiest crowd-pleasing answer where complexity matters less than charm.

Worth Seeking Out

Samos Vin Doux from Samos, Greece. Sweet Muscat from the Aegean with orange-blossom and apricot character — the closest Mediterranean match for knafeh's floral-syrup signature, and genuinely unfamiliar to most UK drinkers.

Avoid

Dry wines of any colour — clash with the syrup entirely; tannic anything — wrong against cheese and pastry; heavily oxidative sweet wines like Pedro Ximénez — too dark for the bright floral profile; dry sparkling — the dryness fights the syrup despite the carbonation logic.

Failing That

A Riesling Spätlese, Mosel.

If All Else Fails

Late harvest Riesling, Mosel.

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