Olivier de Serres, the French Tusser, praises this divine liquor.[475] The anonymous author of the _Hercule Guepin_, a poem penned at the commencement of the seventeenth century in honour of the wine of Orleans, is forced to acknowledge the merits of that of Ay;[476] and that indefatigable commentator, the Abbé de Marolles, in a note to his edition of Martial, classes the growths of Ay, Avenay, and Epernay amongst the best that France produced. 'Vive le bon vin d'Ay!' exclaims Guy Patin enthusiastically; and that strange compound of the wit and the philosopher, St. Evremond, has extolled its qualities in prose and verse.[477] 'If you ask me which wine of all others I prefer,' he writes from London to the Count d'Olonne, about 1671, 'without yielding to tastes introduced by people of sham daintiness, I will answer that good wine of Ay is the most natural of all wines, the most healthy, the best purified from all earth smack; of a most exquisite charm, through the peach flavour which is peculiar to it; and is, in my opinion, the finest of all flavours.'[478] It is improbable that the wine of Ay of Francis I., or of Henri Quatre, was _mousseux_, for had it been so history would have mentioned it. In good years the still wine of Ay has a bouquet and perfume sufficient to account for its ancient reputation. Neither was the wine St. Evremond preferred sparkling, though his reference to the taste introduced by sham _gourmets_ points probably to the custom of drinking the wine before its fermentation was completed, or else to the practice of icing it. When once, however, the introduction of _vin mousseux_ added a new charm to the pleasures of the table, the poets who sang the praises of the foaming nectar seem one and all to have celebrated it as the 'pétillant Ay,' and to have chosen, perhaps for euphonistic reasons, that spot as its birthplace.[479] The material results were equally satisfactory; for Arthur Young mentions that when, on July 8, 1787, he visited 'Ay, a village not far out on the road to Reims very famous for its wines,' he was provided with a letter for M. Lasnier, who had 60,000 bottles in his cellar, whilst M. Dorsé had from 30,000 to 40,000.[480]