Community Profile

The Chemung River Valley is the southern gateway into New York’s largest wine-producing region, The Finger Lakes. Named the world’s most beautiful wine region (Budget Travel’s 2010 Readers’ Choice Awards) and internationally recognized for award-winning wine, the unique geographic conditions of the region make it the ideal home for more than 100 wineries and vineyards.

Mark Twain, renowned author and world-traveler, summered in Elmira for more than twenty years. Perched high above the Chemung River Valley in his octagonal study, Twain penned his literary classics surrounded by the place he described as a “foretaste of heaven”.