Much anticipated and badly needed rain finally made its way into our area over the holiday week, helping to fill drinking water reservoirs and ease the threat of wildfires.

But it hasn't been enough to pull New Jersey out of severe and extreme drought.

That's been a problem for most of the state's farmers, but a boon for winemakers who've been using this historically dry season to their advantage, turning out what they hope to be one of their best harvest ever for grapes, Raven Santana takes a look.

I guess this is the flipside that, you know, you know, your lawn might be browned out this year, but you're going to have some amazing wine at the dinner table at some point, so.

Mike Bonaduce is the owner and winemaker at Bonaduce Farms.

And like most farmers in Jersey, he's been shocked by the extreme drought conditions across the state.

But in Bonaduce's case, he's seeing a major benefit.

While the drought is usually hard for most farmers.

Grapes are the exception, he says.

When we have a dry harvest season, which we had this year, it actually translates to really high wine quality for us.

So it was a great year for us.

January we start pruning and so we'll start pruning, basically creating a trunk, and then we'll replace these two canes with two of these New Year shoots.

Bonaduce gave me a tour of the 77 acre farm of Huntington County, located about an hour west of New York City, which he says will receive a big boon from the change in climate.

Oh, he explained how the dry season affects quality, not quantity.

So what that does is essentially, if you get a lot of rain during harvest, it pulls in through the roots of the grapevine and swells up the barriers.

And so that dilutes all the flavors and sugars in the grapes with water.

So you get sort of a thin diluted wine.

The opposite happened this year where we had almost no rain.

And so those berries say super small.

They're almost like blueberries, they're super tight, packed with flavor, packed with aromatics and a lot of sugar.

So everything we made this year is just like, really dense, really concentrated and really flavorful.

The Thanksgiving holiday did bring much needed rainfall, but not quite enough, despite the recent rain.

New Jersey is still in drought with most of the southern part of the state in extreme drought and the north facing severe drought.

So the crops looked really good going into sort of what we call our harvest season.

And then from August 15 through the end of October, we got a total of two inches of rain on our farm.

So like two inches in two and a half months is a fragment of what we normally get.

Normally that would be 10 to 12 inches.

Bonaduce notes another benefit of the drought.

As long as it's not too severe, it also can help grapes to mature faster.

He says customers will be able to taste the difference in some of the wines this summer.

So it's 2024 now and we're pouring wines from 20 red wines from 2021.

So it's a long time before these wines will actually hit the shelves.

The whites will start drinking in the summer of 2025.

So whites and rosé, as you'll see much earlier, and that'll be great.

It'll be a great way to, you know, get get that quality in front of consumers early and then hopefully start to build the hype about this amazing vintage that's coming for red wines particular.

You'll have to have patience and hold that hype for those red wines.

As he says, you may need to wait until 2027 before you can taste the benefits of this year's drought, which he says will give Napa Valley a run for their money.

For NJ Spotlight News.

I'm Raven Santana.