Zamie,
Your story is similar to my own, both in the amount we drank and the ways we did it. I had a harder time quitting, but once I did, my cravings ended in a pattern similar to yours. I also had in the back of my mind this ideal picture of drinking responsibly on the weekends.
There is a common consensus of opinion out there about what we can't get away with. Much of it, I had discovered on my own through years of drinking. There are other things that I have just gone ahead and accepted as truth without proving them to myself. For example, I never went back to see if I could drink responsibly during my 24 years with out a drink. I don't need to prove it because I have no need to drink responsibly now. I believe that was only a pipe dream. And I have experienced no first hand evidence that this would be possible.
I appreciate your seeing if you can go a month without, but this raises a red flag to me. I know you can. I did, but logically going without alcohol that long proves nothing about how normal you are. In AA, I met alcoholic after alcoholic that would quit for a month, and then come crawling back with broken noses and black eyes. So you tell me what these guys proved about their ability to drink without consequences. In fact, they even admitted they couldn't do that, and each time they came back, they swore they had learned their lesson. But they never acted like they did, because a month later they would disappear again.
That's proof enough to me that alcoholics can't control their drinking once they start, and feeling like they can proves nothing, because feelings can't be trusted.
In the end there is nothing, absolutely nothing to be gained from alcohol, even if you can get just a little drunk and still act responsibly. I have found that life can be fine, and no alcohol is necessary to make it any better. Drinking alcohol does not make my life any better than drinking large quantities of tomato juice. To think that it does, is just a learned response that mimics what we believe we see in the society around us.
Don't stop at one month. Keep at it and learn how good life can be. Unless this is not that important to you or you just don't care.