In August, Martin Markvardsen will mark 20 years with Highland Park. Twenty years is a long time to tell the story of one whisky, especially when the man and the brand become almost impossible for people to separate. Markvardsen has the tattoos, the build, the Orkney weather in the photographs, the kind of presence that makes Highland Park’s old Viking-era packaging feel as though it was designed around him. Yet when we speak, it is not the title or the theatre that he returns to first. It is credibility.
“If I didn’t believe in the brand I worked for, I wouldn’t have been there for 20 years,” he says.
Before Highland Park, Markvardsen had boxed for Denmark, worked as a bouncer, and served in the Danish navy in the military police. Whisky arrived by accident. On an exercise in Scotland almost four decades ago, his colleagues used a day off for a pub crawl. Markvardsen hired a car and drove. Somehow, he ended up at Glenkinchie.
He knew almost nothing about whisky. What caught him was not flavour at first, but pride. A man in the courtyard began talking to him about whisky, Scotland, illegal distilling, excise men and old stories. “The fascination about the storytelling really, really hooked me,” he says.
Markvardsen did not fall for whisky as a liquid and then learn to sell its stories. He fell for the stories first, and the liquid followed. “I needed something else,” he says, thinking back to that younger man shaped by the navy and boxing. “And without knowing it, what I needed was storytelling.”
He used every spare gap from military life to return to Scotland, knocking on distillery doors, working for free, rolling casks, listening and learning. The first person he says really took him seriously was Jim McEwan, who first met him at a Bowmore tasting in Copenhagen. Later, at Bruichladdich, McEwan trusted him enough to give him the keys to the warehouse during festival time.
“Martin, you have something special,” McEwan told him. “Your passion can really, really drive you.”
Michael Jackson encouraged him to follow his dreams. Charlie MacLean taught him history and humility. Jason Craig, Highland Park’s late brand director, became another crucial figure after Markvardsen joined Edrington in 2006.
Markvardsen compares the invitation from Highland Park to a young footballer being asked by Barcelona to come and play. Highland Park was already his favourite whisky. “My heart is up north,” he says. “That’s where my soul is as well.”
That might sound like ambassadorial polish, except Markvardsen has rather permanently backed it up. His body is, as he puts it, “a book of drawings”, carrying Highland Park, Orkney and Viking imagery. The tattoos suited him and suited the brand. For years, Highland Park leaned heavily into Viking identity, and few people embodied that public-facing story more naturally than Markvardsen.
When Markvardsen started with Highland Park, Vikings were not the centre of the brand. That emphasis came later, especially as the packaging and limited releases moved deeper into Norse imagery. At first, it worked. Then, he says, it risked taking over. During Covid, he warned Craig that Highland Park needed to be careful that the Viking story did not become “too cartoonish” or start to overshadow the whisky.
The problem was not that the Viking history was false or irrelevant. It was that it was not the whole of Orkney, and certainly not the whole of Highland Park. The imagery also risked suggesting a much heavier, peatier whisky than Highland Park actually is. The newer direction, then, is not a rejection of Vikings as much as a return to a larger Orkney: heather, peat, light, wind, craft, lifeboats, Neolithic stone, people.
The glamour of his life is obvious from the outside: rare bottles, dinners, travel, special events. But Markvardsen is precise about the cost: preparation, airports, delays, cancelled flights, the hotel room that is just another night away from home. “Breakfast, pillow, and a shower,” he says, is more valuable to him now than luxury.
As the anniversary approaches, Highland Park has selected eight single casks to mark the occasion, destined for different markets. Markvardsen will also be in Orkney during the anniversary week, pouring for the team and for Highland Park fans. Celebration, though, is not really the point. Usefulness is.
After two decades, he says he still wants people to come away from his tastings having learned something new. “As long as I have something to give,” he says, he can continue.
The most revealing moment comes when I ask what he hopes people would say he achieved if he walked away tomorrow. He does not reach for fame, awards, travel or even longevity. He hopes he helped change the understanding of Highland Park, and perhaps the way ambassadors work: storytelling, not just promotion.
And then he gently resists the obvious label. “People often say that I’m the face of Highland Park,” he says. “I’m not sure that’s the right way to be remembered.” The real faces, he says, are the people in production on Orkney. “That’s the real heroes.”
It is a striking thing for whisky’s longest-serving ambassador for a single malt whisky to say. But perhaps it explains why he has lasted. Markvardsen became a storyteller by listening first: to distillery workers, to mentors, to Orkney, to the whisky, and now to a new generation he hopes will carry some of that knowledge forward.
Looking back to the young Danish man who wandered into Glenkinchie all those years ago, he says he would tell him to go for it. He would not change it. He would not miss “a minute or a second” of the journey. Twenty years north, and still listening.
