To me, anyway, the ironic part is that Ms. Josephine Cochrane is either laughing or having a conniption fit from beyond her grave, having supposedly invented the dishwasher to protect her fragile dishes.
And yeah, things have changed, a lot, in fact.
And some dishes may be too fragile for some machines or water temperature or aggressive detergents.
On the other hand, while I do believe some people can in fact smell leftover detergent scents in a glass of wine, well, I think it's weird that people even *buy* detergents for dishwashing which are highly scented, I, for one, do not want everything smelling of even lemons, much less "tropical" whatever when the machine is done, and on another (third) hand, I think it's ridiculous that so many people who can not taste/smell the difference to save their lives when it's a regular (not highly scented) detergent keep going thru all that trouble.
It reminds me of a story that happened on my husband's workplace. There was an obnoxious guy who kept poo-pooing the office coffee, and bringing his "special" coffee which he kept in the freezer and refused to share with others. One day, another co-worker, fed up with all the snobbish attitude, replaced his coffee with stuff from the office and made his special thing for the office. Neither the workers nor the jerk noticed any difference, and, if the guy who switched things had been able to contain his laughter and not told others, no one would ever know. Sure, maybe a pro coffee taster could tell instantly, but most people can't to save their lives.
Also, save your money, because, unless things have changed dramatically in South America, your "hand-harvested, shade-grown, mountain-grown" coffee from Colombia or wherever is probably none of those. For the longest time, people who grew coffee in Brazil had to pay thru their noses to export it, so what they did was to smuggle it across the borders to some other place like Colombia, Peru, Ecuador etc, to be sold as specialty stuff that people pay way more than for the "bad" Brazilian coffees. As one of my friends used to tease others when a pile of labels like that ("shade-grown, mountain-grown" etc) got uttered, the thing to inquire about is "is it dolphin-safe?" and see what happens. (As an aside, if all the "Scotch whiskey" and "Colombian coffee" were actually from the places they claim to be from, they would need to plant at least 3 layers because the countries do not have the room to produce all that it's claimed to be produced in those places to begin with. Think about it.)
Unless you can actually taste the difference and you *care* about the difference, don't bother, and don't try to impress others with that either. I had acquaintances have lasagna for dinner at our home one day, and then, two weeks or so later, they were visiting and I served lasagna again, since they had liked it the previous time -- I had a heck of a time just saying "thank you" and not cracking up to their faces when they claimed this one was *much* better than the previous one, given that it was the same batch that I had frozen half of the last time, and, in particular, this was a person who "hated" frozen food and thought she "could tell" when things were frozen. Nope, she couldn't. And, to be fair, _some_ things improve while frozen because the spices and flavors have more time to meld together, but that is rare, I'm told.
Anyway, just know that if you are visiting me, in all likelihood, unless something really might get destroyed by the dishwasher (some kinds of aluminum, some kinds of pressure-cooker valves) or are poor candidates for machine washing (things with very narrow openings, like the vacuum coffee makers, for example), I will have run it thru the dishwasher. If you are one of those people who just can't stand drinking wine or beer form a machine-washed glass, too bad, you can skip drinking during your visit. In fact, given that *I* am severely allergic to alcohol in the first place (skin rashes, not fun), I never even serve the thing at my home, although I have nothing against people bringing their own wine or beer and enjoying it, as long as I'm not forced to partake.
In any case, I'm having difficulties thinking that all the expensive restaurants are hand-washing beer and wine glasses with that laborious routine, they are probably just running the things thru the dishwasher too.
Cheers,
-- Paulo.
