How can you change ./configure to use a specific binary over /usr/bin?

Running macOS Catalina 10.15.6. My question is more related to compilation with GNU tools, so it may be more suited for a different SE site — I'll be happy to close and ask somewhere else if that's the case. I'm trying to compile software (namely wine-6.0) and the compilation requires bison, for which there's already an executable in /usr/bin. However, bison needs to be version >3.0 to compile the program and the binary in /usr/bin is version 2.7.6. I compiled bison 3.7.6 and I was gonna just move the new bison 3.7 binary into /usr/bin but due to the filesystem protection of macOS, I can't just replace /usr/bin/bison. I'd have to restart my mac in recovery mode to disable the filesystem lock, but I have something open that can't stop running at the moment. Using ./configure --enable-win64 gives the following error:

checking for bison... bison
checking whether bison is recent enough... no
configure: error: Your bison version is too old. Please install bison version 3.0 or newer.

To fix it, I thought modifying PATH would work; I moved the bison 3.7.6 binary to /usr/local/bin/bison and did export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH before ./configure but it doesn't work; it still just errors about not having bison >3.0 (the same error as before I tried to mess with bison):

checking for bison... bison
checking whether bison is recent enough... no
configure: error: Your bison version is too old. Please install bison version 3.0 or newer.

The weird thing is, just trying to run bison uses the right binary.

$ bison -V
bison (GNU Bison) 3.7.6
Written by Robert Corbett and Richard Stallman.
...

$ which bison
/usr/local/bin/bison

I also tried messing with the configure.ac file a little, but the problem is I don't really know what I'm doing there. Editing the config file and rerunning autoconf and using ./configure then still doesn't work. Ultimately, my question is: how do I ensure ./configure uses the correct bison binary?