I asked my hubby how much he would 'like' to be drinking if he could wave a magic wand and anything was possible. He said he'd like 5 nights not drinking and 2 nights where he could drink. I left it at that. Much later (like a week or two) I asked if we ought to make it a target - and I asked him what things made it difficult to keep the drinking down. I figured that as it was I didn't have many answers so I'd better find out how he saw it.
At the time he was only drinking about a 4 pack a night but as he's previously had a very severe drink problem - a 4 pack was too much for him.
It did start to get him thinking, he would plan non-drinking days and often fail - but even that sunk in. Eventually we acknowledged that we both needed to know whether he or the booze was in control - if it was the booze we'd agreed to stop completely. The test was whether he could get the drinking to where HE had said he wanted it - just two days a week. Trying to do that carried on for about 6 weeks, at which point he'd improved and was having at least one or two days not drinking but the effort was immense and overall it got to a point where he didn't think he would make it. The result was him suggesting we stop completely 10 days ago - and we have.
It's not so much a non-confrontational comment - more that I tried to keep confrontation out of it. He's got very little self confidence and if I'd tried suggesting he was still acting as a drunk (ie an addict) it wouldn't have helped, it's different for him to decide for himself it's not really in his control.